MCP server · Research
Google Scholar MCP server
by HasData
Lets your AI search Google Scholar and pull ready-made citations for papers you find.
This is a helper that connects your AI assistant to Google Scholar. Once it is set up, you can ask your AI to find papers on a topic, look up who cited them, or give you a citation in APA or BibTeX. It is handy for students, researchers, writers, and anyone who has to gather sources and cite them properly.
What is an MCP server? The 30-second version
On its own, your AI can only chat with you using what it already knows. An MCP server is a small helper program that gives your AI a new skill or a connection to an outside service. This one connects your AI to Google Scholar, so when you ask about papers or citations, the AI can actually go look them up instead of guessing. You stay in the same chat window; the helper does the fetching behind the scenes.
What this MCP server does
You ask your AI something like find papers on a topic, and the AI sends that request to this helper. The helper talks to Google Scholar and brings back a page of results with titles, links, authors, and citation counts. If you then ask for a citation, the AI takes the paper's id from that first result and asks the helper again. The helper returns the citation in five styles plus export links for BibTeX and EndNote. You see the answers in the chat, as text you can copy.
Click to zoomWhat you can do with it
- Search Google Scholar for papers on a topic, by author, or within a year range
- Sort results by date or by relevance
- Find review articles only, or exclude citation-only entries
- See who cited a paper and follow the citation trail
- See every indexed version of the same paper
- Get a citation in MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, or Vancouver
- Get BibTeX and EndNote export links for a paper
Try asking your AI
- “Find papers on transformer architectures published since 2023 and sort them by citation count.”
- “Who has cited this paper, and how has that grown year on year?”
- “Give me the BibTeX for this paper.”
- “Find recent work by this author on this topic.”
What it gives back to you
You get back a list of papers with titles, links, short snippets, author names, publication details, and citation counts. For citations, you get the formatted text in several styles plus links to export files. It all shows up as text in your chat, ready to copy into your notes or bibliography. Some answers take two steps, because the AI first needs to find the paper before it can cite it.
Before you start
What you need
- An MCP client such as Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, or VS Code
- A HasData API key from their dashboard (free to create, no card needed; it works like a password for the service)
- For the config-file route in Claude Desktop, Node.js or Python installed so the small launcher can run
Good to know
Each call uses credits from your HasData account (10 per successful call), and the free tier covers about 100 calls a month, so keep an eye on usage if you ask for a lot of searches.
Install it with your AI
Add Google Scholar MCP server to your AI, no technical skills needed
You don't install anything by hand. You copy one prompt, paste it into an AI that can work on your computer, and it checks, installs and connects the server for you, asking you when it needs something.
Sign in to get the install prompt
Members get a ready-made prompt that lets the Claude desktop app check Google Scholar MCP server, install it and connect it for them, step by step. You don't need any technical skills: you copy, paste and answer a few questions. Your connected AI can also find and install any of the 4,066 MCP servers here for you.
Who it's for
Students, researchers, academics, and writers who need to find papers and produce citations without doing it all by hand.
