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Scholar MCP

Scholarly papers, patents, books, standards and PDF conversion

What the server can reach, what it changes and who gets in is set out in the security model.

Where to go

  • Get started: a first success with the client you use.
  • Deploy: run it for real, in a container and behind authentication.
  • Use: get more out of its features.
  • Reference: configuration, tools, resources, prompts and the command line.
  • Upgrade: release channels and what changes when you move.
  • Contribute: change the project.

Features

Scholar MCP exposes 29 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.
  • Background jobs: slow work returns a job handle to poll with get_job_result, while a fast call or a cache hit answers directly.

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

Coverage by domain

Per-domain depth varies: papers have the richest tool surface and standards the least. 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.

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) · Job Polling (1)          │
│                                                               │
│  ┌────▼─────────▼──────────▼───────────▼─────────────▼────┐  │
│  │                  SQLite Cache (TTL)                    │  │
│  └───┬──────┬──────────┬───────┬──────────┬─────────┬─────┘  │
└──────┼──────┼──────────┼───────┼──────────┼─────────┼────────┘
       │      │          │       │          │         │
  ┌────▼───┐ ┌▼────────┐ ┌▼────┐ ┌▼──────┐ ┌▼───────┐ ┌▼──────┐
  │Semantic│ │OpenAlex │ │ EPO │ │ Open  │ │ NIST / │ │docling│
  │Scholar │ │   API   │ │ OPS │ │Library│ │  IETF /│ │ -serve│
  │  API   │ │         │ │     │ │       │ │  W3C / │ │(opt.) │
  │        │ │         │ │     │ │       │ │  ETSI  │ │       │
  └────────┘ └─────────┘ └─────┘ └───────┘ └────────┘ └───────┘

What you can do

  • Survey a field: "Find the 20 most-cited papers on graph neural networks from 2020 to 2024 and draft a literature review outline." Composes search_papers + get_citations + enrich_paper.
  • Trace a citation path: "What's the shortest citation path from 'Attention is All You Need' to 'RLHF for dialogue agents'?" Uses find_bridge_papers + get_citation_graph.
  • Cross-reference prior art: "For this patent family, list academic papers it cites and any books or standards that show up in the description." Composes get_patent + batch_resolve + standards/book enrichment.
  • Generate a bibliography: "Emit BibTeX for these 30 DOIs with OpenAlex venue data." Uses generate_citations.
  • Look up a standard: "What's the latest status of RFC 9000, and fetch the Markdown full text." Uses resolve_standard_identifier + get_standard.