📌Overview

Purpose: To provide a platform for searching and retrieving accurate academic articles from various scholarly sources.

Overview: The MCP Scholarly server is designed to facilitate efficient access to academic literature by enabling users to search for articles based on specific keywords. It focuses on enhancing the research capabilities of users by integrating with scholarly databases, with plans for future expansion to include more scholarly vendors.

Key Features:

• Keyword Search Tool: Allows users to search for articles related to specified keywords, enhancing the ease of finding relevant academic publications.

• Support for Multiple Configurations: Offers flexible installation options, including direct configuration, Docker integration, and automated installation via Smithery, catering to different user preferences and environments.

mcp-scholarly MCP server

A MCP server to search for accurate academic articles. More scholarly vendors will be added soon.

Components

Tools

The server implements one tool:

• search-arxiv: Search arxiv for articles related to the given keyword.
  • Takes "keyword" as required string argument

Quickstart

Install

Claude Desktop

On MacOS: ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
On Windows: %APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

"mcpServers": {
  "mcp-scholarly": {
    "command": "uv",
    "args": [
      "--directory",
      "/Users/adityakarnam/PycharmProjects/mcp-scholarly/mcp-scholarly",
      "run",
      "mcp-scholarly"
    ]
  }
}

"mcpServers": {
  "mcp-scholarly": {
    "command": "uvx",
    "args": [
      "mcp-scholarly"
    ]
  }
}

or if you are using Docker

"mcpServers": {
  "mcp-scholarly": {
    "command": "docker",
    "args": [
      "run", "--rm", "-i",
      "mcp/scholarly"
    ]
  }
}

Installing via Smithery

To install mcp-scholarly for Claude Desktop automatically via Smithery:

npx -y @smithery/cli install mcp-scholarly --client claude

Development

Building and Publishing

To prepare the package for distribution:

1. Sync dependencies and update lockfile:

uv sync

2. Build package distributions:

uv build

This will create source and wheel distributions in the dist/ directory.

3. Publish to PyPI:

uv publish

Note: You'll need to set PyPI credentials via environment variables or command flags:

• Token: --token or UV_PUBLISH_TOKEN
• Or username/password: --username/UV_PUBLISH_USERNAME and --password/UV_PUBLISH_PASSWORD

Debugging

Since MCP servers run over stdio, debugging can be challenging. For the best debugging experience, it is strongly recommended to use the MCP Inspector.

You can launch the MCP Inspector via npm with this command:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector uv --directory /Users/adityakarnam/PycharmProjects/mcp-scholarly/mcp-scholarly run mcp-scholarly

Upon launching, the Inspector will display a URL that you can access in your browser to begin debugging.