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Scholar MCP Server

A FastMCP server for the scholarly citation landscape -- papers, patents, books, and standards -- giving LLMs a unified way to search, cross-reference, and retrieve prior art across all four source types via Semantic Scholar, EPO Open Patent Services, Open Library, and standards bodies, with OpenAlex enrichment and optional docling-serve PDF/full-text conversion.

What it does

Scholar MCP exposes 27 tools that let LLM-powered applications search, cross-reference, and retrieve scholarly sources across four peer domains:

  • Papers -- full-text search (year, venue, field, citation filters); single-paper lookup by DOI / S2 ID / arXiv / ACM / PubMed; author profile and name search; forward citations, backward references, BFS citation graph, shortest-path bridge discovery; recommendations from positive/negative examples; BibTeX/CSL-JSON/RIS citation generation; OpenAlex enrichment (affiliations, funders, OA status, and concepts).
  • Patents -- search across 100+ patent offices via EPO OPS with CPC / applicant / inventor / jurisdiction filters; biblio, claims, description, family, legal and citations sections; NPL-to-paper resolution via Semantic Scholar and paper-to-patent citation discovery; patent PDF download via EPO OPS.
  • Books -- search by title/author/keywords via Open Library; lookup by ISBN or Open Library ID; subject recommendations. Papers with an ISBN are automatically enriched with publisher/edition/cover/subject metadata.
  • Standards -- identifier resolution, search, and metadata retrieval for NIST, IETF, W3C, and ETSI, with optional full-text fetch and Markdown conversion via docling.
  • Cross-source Utility -- resolve up to 100 mixed identifiers (paper DOIs, patent numbers, ISBNs) to full metadata in one call.
  • 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.

Coverage by domain

Per-domain depth is uneven — papers currently have the richest tool surface, standards the leanest. That reflects public data availability, not a value hierarchy: writing a paper typically needs all four source types for citations and prior art. Parity work is tracked in GitHub issues and milestones — the roadmap shows intent, not a completeness commitment.

Quick start

/plugin marketplace add pvliesdonk/claude-plugins
/plugin install scholar-mcp@pvliesdonk

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)                        │
│                                                               │
│  ┌────────┐ ┌────────┐ ┌────────┐ ┌───────────┐ ┌──────────┐  │
│  │ Papers │ │Patents │ │ Books  │ │ Standards │ │   PDF    │  │
│  │  (10)  │ │  (4)   │ │  (3)   │ │    (3)    │ │   (4)    │  │
│  └────┬───┘ └────┬───┘ └────┬───┘ └─────┬─────┘ └─────┬────┘  │
│       │         │          │           │             │       │
│       + Cross-source Utility (1) · Task Polling (2)          │
│                                                               │
│  ┌────▼─────────▼──────────▼───────────▼─────────────▼────┐  │
│  │                  SQLite Cache (TTL)                    │  │
│  └───┬──────┬──────────┬───────┬──────────┬─────────┬─────┘  │
└──────┼──────┼──────────┼───────┼──────────┼─────────┼────────┘
       │      │          │       │          │         │
  ┌────▼───┐ ┌▼────────┐ ┌▼────┐ ┌▼──────┐ ┌▼───────┐ ┌▼──────┐
  │Semantic│ │OpenAlex │ │ EPO │ │ Open  │ │ NIST / │ │docling│
  │Scholar │ │   API   │ │ OPS │ │Library│ │  IETF /│ │ -serve│
  │  API   │ │         │ │     │ │       │ │  W3C / │ │(opt.) │
  │        │ │         │ │     │ │       │ │  ETSI  │ │       │
  └────────┘ └─────────┘ └─────┘ └───────┘ └────────┘ └───────┘

Next steps