crossref-academic-mcp-server

MCP Server that gives AI agents access to scientific papers, citations, and academic research data. Queries Crossref, OpenAlex, and Semantic Scholar — three major open academic APIs covering 150M+ research works.

No API keys required. All data sources are free and open.

| Tool | Description | |------|-------------| | search_papers | Search for scientific papers across Crossref + OpenAlex simultaneously | | get_paper_details | Get full metadata for a paper via DOI (bibliographic data + abstract + impact metrics) | | get_citations | Find papers that cite a given paper (via Semantic Scholar) | | get_author_profile | Look up an author's profile — publications, h-index, affiliations, research topics | | search_topics | Find the most-cited recent papers in a topic area (trending research since 2023) |

pip install crossref-academic-mcp-server

git clone https://github.com/AiAgentKarl/crossref-academic-mcp-server.git
cd crossref-academic-mcp-server
pip install -e .

Add to your MCP client config (e.g. Claude Desktop claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "crossref-academic": {
      "command": "crossref-server"
    }
  }
}

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "crossref-academic": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["crossref-academic-mcp-server"]
    }
  }
}

Search for papers: > "Find recent papers about transformer architectures in NLP"

Look up a specific paper: > "Get details for DOI 10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2"

Explore citations: > "What papers cite the original attention paper?"

Author lookup: > "Show me Yoshua Bengio's publication profile"

Trending research: > "What are the most-cited papers about quantum computing from the last two years?"

• **Crossre