Name: crossref-mcp-server
Author: cyanheads

@cyanheads/crossref-mcp-server

Resolve DOIs, search ~155M scholarly works, and fetch references via the Crossref REST API. STDIO or Streamable HTTP.

5 Tools

Tools

Five tools for working with Crossref data — DOI resolution, full-text search across all scholarly works, outgoing reference lists, and journal/funder lookup:

Tool	Description
`crossref_get_work`	Resolve a DOI to its full Crossref metadata record: title, authors, affiliations, abstract (when deposited), journal, publication date, type, license, full-text links, funder acknowledgements, and outgoing reference list
`crossref_search_works`	Search the Crossref works index by free text and/or structured filters. Supports sort, field selection, and cursor-based deep paging. Large result sets spill to a DataCanvas table for SQL querying.
`crossref_get_references`	Return the outgoing reference list for a DOI — the works cited by this paper, with raw citation strings and resolved DOIs where available
`crossref_search_journals`	Find Crossref journal records by ISSN or title query; optionally retrieve the journal's most recent works
`crossref_search_funders`	Find funders registered in the Crossref Funder Registry by name or funder DOI; optionally retrieve funded works

`crossref_get_work`

Resolve a DOI to its canonical Crossref record.

DOI validated against 10.NNNN/suffix regex before the upstream call
Returns title, authors with affiliations, abstract (when deposited), container/journal, publication date, work type, ISSN, license URLs, full-text link URLs, and funder acknowledgements
Incoming citation count (is-referenced-by-count) is included; citing works are not — Crossref does not expose that data. Use OpenAlex for citation graphs.

`crossref_search_works`

Search across ~155M Crossref-registered works.

Free-text query plus a structured filter object using Crossref's hyphen-separated key syntax: from-pub-date, until-pub-date, type, funder, issn, member, has-abstract, has-references, has-full-text, directory (use DOAJ to restrict to open-access content)
Sort by relevance, is-referenced-by-count, published, deposited, or score
fields parameter narrows response payload — useful for large result sets
Offset paging up to ~10K results; deep paging requires cursor=* on the first call, then pass the returned next-cursor token. Cursor and offset cannot be combined.
Large result sets automatically spill to a DataCanvas table for SQL querying (requires CANVAS_PROVIDER_TYPE=duckdb; disabled on Workers)

`crossref_get_references`

Fetch the outgoing reference list for a DOI.