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Scholar MCP Server

A FastMCP server providing structured academic literature access via Semantic Scholar, with OpenAlex enrichment and optional docling-serve PDF conversion.

What it does

Scholar MCP exposes 19 tools that let LLM-powered applications search, explore, and retrieve academic papers:

  • Search & retrieval -- find papers by keyword, look up by DOI/arXiv/S2 ID, search authors
  • Citation graph -- traverse forward citations, backward references, build citation graphs, discover bridge papers between fields
  • Recommendations -- get paper suggestions from positive and negative examples
  • OpenAlex enrichment -- augment Semantic Scholar metadata with affiliations, funders, OA status, and concepts
  • PDF conversion -- download PDFs and convert to Markdown via docling-serve, with optional VLM enrichment for formulas and figures; automatic fallback to ArXiv, PubMed Central, and Unpaywall; direct URL download for alternative versions
  • Async task queue -- long-running operations return immediately with a task ID; poll for results with get_task_result

Results are cached in a local SQLite database with per-table TTLs to minimize API calls and speed up repeated lookups.

Quick start

uvx --from pvliesdonk-scholar-mcp scholar-mcp serve

pip install 'pvliesdonk-scholar-mcp[mcp]'
scholar-mcp serve

docker run -v scholar-mcp-data:/data/scholar-mcp \
           ghcr.io/pvliesdonk/scholar-mcp:latest

API key optional but recommended

The server works without a Semantic Scholar API key, but unauthenticated requests are limited to ~1 req/s and will hit 429 throttles quickly during multi-step operations like citation graph traversal. Request a free key to get ~10 req/s. Pass it via SCHOLAR_MCP_S2_API_KEY=your-key.

See Installation for all methods including Linux packages.

Architecture

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│               MCP Client                     │
│     (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, etc.)      │
└──────────────┬───────────────────────────────┘
               │ stdio / HTTP / SSE
┌──────────────▼───────────────────────────────┐
│           scholar-mcp (FastMCP)              │
│                                              │
│  ┌─────────┐ ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────────┐  │
│  │ Search  │ │ Citation │ │    PDF       │  │
│  │ Tools   │ │ Graph    │ │ Conversion   │  │
│  └────┬────┘ └────┬─────┘ └──────┬───────┘  │
│       │           │              │           │
│  ┌────▼───────────▼──────────────▼────────┐  │
│  │          SQLite Cache (TTL)            │  │
│  └────┬───────────┬──────────────┬────────┘  │
└───────┼───────────┼──────────────┼───────────┘
        │           │              │
   ┌────▼────┐ ┌────▼─────┐ ┌─────▼──────┐
   │Semantic │ │ OpenAlex │ │  docling-  │
   │Scholar  │ │   API    │ │   serve    │
   │  API    │ │          │ │ (optional) │
   └─────────┘ └──────────┘ └────────────┘

Next steps