Scholar MCP server

Scholar MCP is a helper that lets your AI assistant look up real research papers instead of guessing. You ask a question in normal words, and it searches many academic sources at once, opens the papers, and keeps the ones you care about in a small library on your computer. It is handy for students, researchers, analysts, and anyone who needs to check facts against actual studies.

What this MCP server does

You type a research question in plain words, like you would ask a colleague. Your AI sends that question to this helper program. The helper searches many academic sources at the same time, removes duplicates, and ranks the best matches. It can then open a paper, pull out its text, and show you the citations and references around it. Anything you pick can be saved into a local library that grows each time you use it.

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What you can do with it

• Search for papers across OpenAlex, Semantic Scholar, arXiv, PubMed, and more in one go
• Find related work through citations and semantic similarity
• Read the full text of an open-access paper and get page-aware summaries
• Download a PDF and keep it in a collection on your computer
• Build a citation graph to see which papers are foundations or bridges in a field
• Look up author profiles, affiliations, and h-index
• Export your saved papers to Obsidian, Zotero, or Notion

Try asking your AI

• “Find recent papers about retrieval augmented generation for legal documents”
• “What papers cite the original transformer paper and are most influential?”
• “Read the conclusion of this paper and summarize the main findings”
• “Save these five papers into a collection called rag and export it to my Obsidian vault”

What it gives back to you

You get back a short list of papers with titles, authors, years, and links, plus a plain-text summary of what each one is about. When you ask it to read a paper, it returns page-aware text, and sometimes tables or figure captions. If you build a graph, you get a list of nodes and edges, and a Mermaid diagram you can view. Anything you save shows up in your local library and can be exported to your notes app.

Before you start

Who it's for

Students, researchers, analysts, and anyone who needs to find and check real academic papers without leaving their AI chat.