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.

Tools

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)

Installation

With pip (recommended)

pip install crossref-academic-mcp-server

From source

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

Configuration

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

Using pip install

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

Using uvx (no install needed)

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

Example Usage

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?"

Data Sources

• Crossref — 150M+ metadata records, DOI resolution, bibliographic data
• OpenAlex — Open catalog of scholarly works, authors, institutions, topics
• Semantic Scholar — AI-powered citation analysis, abstracts, impact metrics

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License

MIT