Scholar MCP Server

scholar-mcp

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 (NIST, IETF, W3C, ETSI), with OpenAlex enrichment and optional docling-serve PDF/full-text conversion.

Features

Source domains

• Papers -- full-text search with year/venue/field/citation filters; single-paper lookup by DOI, S2 ID, arXiv ID, ACM ID, or PubMed ID; author profile and name search; forward citations, backward references, BFS graph traversal, shortest-path bridge discovery; recommendations from positive/negative examples; BibTeX/CSL-JSON/RIS citation generation with OpenAlex venue enrichment.
• Patents -- search across 100+ patent offices via EPO OPS with CPC/applicant/inventor/jurisdiction filters; bibliographic, claims, description, family, legal, and citations sections; NPL-to-paper resolution via Semantic Scholar and paper-to-patent citation discovery. EPO credentials are optional -- other domains work without them.
• Books -- search by title/author/keywords via Open Library (no API key required); lookup by ISBN-10/13, Open Library work ID, or edition ID; subject-based recommendations sorted by popularity; Google Books excerpts and preview links; WorldCat permalinks for library discovery; cover image caching. Papers with an ISBN in externalIds are automatically enriched with publisher, edition, cover URL, and subject data from Open Library.
• Standards -- identifier resolution, search, and metadata retrieval for NIST, IETF, W3C, and ETSI standards, with optional full-text fetch and Markdown conversion via docling. Tier 2 ISO, IEC, IEEE, Common Criteria (CC), and CEN/CENELEC metadata (including ISO/IEC/IEEE joint standards and the CC ↔ ISO/IEC 15408 cross-link) is synced locally via sync-standards. ISO, IEC, IEEE have a live-fetch fallback for unsynced identifiers; CC and CEN have no live API and require a sync first. Citations matching standards patterns (RFC, ISO, NIST SP, IEEE, EN, CC) are automatically enriched with structured standard_metadata including identifier, title, body, status, and full-text URL when available (see docs/guides/standards.md).

Cross-cutting

• Enrichment pipeline -- phased enrichment from multiple sources: OpenAlex (OA status, affiliations, funders, concepts), CrossRef (publisher, page ranges, container titles), Google Books (preview links, excerpts), and Open Library (book metadata). Runs automatically on paper and book results.
• PDF conversion -- download open-access PDFs and convert to Markdown via docling-serve, with optional VLM enrichment for formulas and figures; automatic fallback to ArXiv, PubMed Central, and Unpaywall when Semantic Scholar has no OA link; direct URL download for PDFs found elsewhere.
• Intelligent caching -- SQLite-backed cache with per-table TTLs (30 days for papers/authors, 7 days for citations/references) and identifier aliasing.
• Authentication -- bearer token, OIDC (OAuth 2.1), or both simultaneously (multi-auth).
• Multi-transport -- stdio (Claude Desktop), HTTP (streamable-http), and SSE transports.
• Linux packages -- .deb and .rpm packages with systemd service and security hardening.

Coverage by domain

Per-domain depth is uneven. Papers currently have the richest tool surface (citation graph, recommendations, cross-referencing to all three other domains); standards are 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.

Installation

Claude Code plugin

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

Claude Desktop (.mcpb bundle)

Download scholar-mcp-<VERSION>.mcpb from the latest release and open it in Claude Desktop, or install via the Claude Desktop MCP gallery.

With uvx (recommended)

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

With pip

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

With Docker

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

Linux packages

Download .deb or .rpm from the latest release:

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo dpkg -i scholar-mcp_*.deb

# RHEL/Fedora
sudo rpm -i scholar-mcp-*.rpm

Note: The PyPI package is pvliesdonk-scholar-mcp. The CLI command installed is scholar-mcp.

Quick Start

stdio transport (Claude Desktop / MCP clients)

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

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.

Claude Desktop configuration (claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "scholar": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "pvliesdonk-scholar-mcp", "scholar-mcp", "serve"],
      "env": {
        "SCHOLAR_MCP_S2_API_KEY": "your-key"
      }
    }
  }
}

HTTP transport

uvx --from pvliesdonk-scholar-mcp scholar-mcp serve --transport http --port 8000

Syncing Tier 2 standards catalogues

Tier 2 bodies (ISO, IEC, IEEE, CC, CEN) are populated from community-curated bulk dumps rather than live-scraped at MCP-server runtime. Run the sync on first install and periodically thereafter:

scholar-mcp sync-standards            # all registered bodies
scholar-mcp sync-standards --body ISO # only ISO
scholar-mcp sync-standards --body IEEE # only IEEE
scholar-mcp sync-standards --body CC   # only Common Criteria
scholar-mcp sync-standards --body CEN # only CEN/CENELEC
scholar-mcp sync-standards --force    # re-sync even if upstream SHA is unchanged

Schedule via cron / launchd / systemd timer — weekly is sufficient; standards change slowly. First sync can take several minutes; subsequent runs that find no upstream changes exit within seconds.

Configuration

All settings are controlled via environment variables with the SCHOLAR_MCP_ prefix.

Core

PDF Conversion (optional)

Patent Search (optional)

Google Books (optional)

Tier 2 standards sync (optional)

Authentication (optional)

MCP Tools

28 tools, organised by scholarly source type.

Papers

Search & retrieval

Citation graph

Recommendations & citation generation

Patents

Patent tools are hidden when SCHOLAR_MCP_EPO_CONSUMER_KEY and SCHOLAR_MCP_EPO_CONSUMER_SECRET are not set. fetch_patent_pdf is also write-tagged and hidden when SCHOLAR_MCP_READ_ONLY=true.

Books

Papers with an ISBN in their externalIds are automatically enriched with book_metadata (publisher, edition, cover URL, subjects, and more) from Open Library when fetched via get_paper, get_citations, get_references, or get_citation_graph. Book records also include worldcat_url (when ISBN-13 is present), google_books_url, and snippet from Google Books enrichment. Cover images can be downloaded and cached locally via get_book.

Standards

Tier-1 bodies (NIST, IETF, W3C, ETSI) are supported with full metadata and optional full-text conversion. Tier-2 bodies (ISO, IEC, IEEE, CC, CEN/CENELEC) are populated locally via scholar-mcp sync-standards.

Cross-source Utility

PDF Conversion (requires docling-serve)

PDF tools are write-tagged and hidden when SCHOLAR_MCP_READ_ONLY=true (the default). fetch_patent_pdf (above) and the get_standard full-text mode cover the patent and standards equivalents.

Task Polling

Long-running operations (PDF download/conversion) and rate-limited backend requests return {"queued": true, "task_id": "..."} immediately. Use get_task_result to poll for the result.

Docker Compose

services:
  scholar-mcp:
    image: ghcr.io/pvliesdonk/scholar-mcp:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    environment:
      SCHOLAR_MCP_S2_API_KEY: "${SCHOLAR_MCP_S2_API_KEY}"
      SCHOLAR_MCP_DOCLING_URL: "http://docling-serve:5001"
      SCHOLAR_MCP_VLM_API_URL: "${VLM_API_URL:-}"
      SCHOLAR_MCP_VLM_API_KEY: "${VLM_API_KEY:-}"
      SCHOLAR_MCP_CACHE_DIR: "/data/scholar-mcp"
      SCHOLAR_MCP_READ_ONLY: "false"
    volumes:
      - scholar-mcp-data:/data/scholar-mcp
    labels:
      - "traefik.enable=true"
      - "traefik.http.routers.scholar-mcp.rule=Host(`scholar-mcp.yourdomain.com`)"

  docling-serve:
    image: ghcr.io/ds4sd/docling-serve:latest
    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  scholar-mcp-data:

Cache Management

# Show cache statistics (row counts, database size)
scholar-mcp cache stats

# Clear all cached data (preserves identifier aliases)
scholar-mcp cache clear

# Remove entries older than 30 days
scholar-mcp cache clear --older-than 30

# Override cache directory
scholar-mcp cache stats --cache-dir /path/to/cache

Development

# Install with dev and MCP dependencies
uv sync --extra dev --extra mcp

# Run tests
uv run pytest

# Lint and format
uv run ruff check src/ tests/
uv run ruff format src/ tests/

# Type check
uv run mypy src/

# Build docs locally
uv sync --extra docs
uv run mkdocs serve

License

MIT