English

PubMed-OCR: PMC Open Access OCR Annotations

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-01-19 v1 Computation and Language Digital Libraries Machine Learning

Abstract

PubMed-OCR is an OCR-centric corpus of scientific articles derived from PubMed Central Open Access PDFs. Each page image is annotated with Google Cloud Vision and released in a compact JSON schema with word-, line-, and paragraph-level bounding boxes. The corpus spans 209.5K articles (1.5M pages; ~1.3B words) and supports layout-aware modeling, coordinate-grounded QA, and evaluation of OCR-dependent pipelines. We analyze corpus characteristics (e.g., journal coverage and detected layout features) and discuss limitations, including reliance on a single OCR engine and heuristic line reconstruction. We release the data and schema to facilitate downstream research and invite extensions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.11425,
  title  = {PubMed-OCR: PMC Open Access OCR Annotations},
  author = {Hunter Heidenreich and Yosheb Getachew and Olivia Dinica and Ben Elliott},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.11425},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:07:49.097Z