scholar-mcp

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.

Documentation | PyPI | Docker

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