nickjlamb/pubcrawl

A peer-reviewed pub crawl through the literature — the label — and the trial.
Quick start · Tools · Examples · Architecture · Roadmap · Contributing
## ✨ What is PubCrawl?
PubCrawl connects your AI assistant (Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible client) directly to the primary sources clinicians and researchers actually use — so you can ask a question in plain English and get an answer grounded in PubMed, Europe PMC, FDA/UK drug labelling, and ClinicalTrials.gov, with real PMIDs, NCT IDs, and DOIs you can verify.
Every tool is a thin, deterministic wrapper over an official API. Nothing is invented; every result cites its source.
### The thing no other MCP server does
Ask "compare US and UK labelling for semaglutide" and PubCrawl pulls both live labels and maps equivalent sections — US Indications and Usage ↔ UK 4.1 Therapeutic indications, and so on — so the differences are visible instead of assumed:
| | US Prescribing Information | UK SmPC |
| Indications | glycaemic control · reduce risk of MACE in T2D with established CVD · reduce risk of sustained eGFR decline, ESKD and CV death in T2D with CKD | glycaemic control only — CV and renal outcomes appear as cross-references to §4.4/4.5/5.1, not as indications |
| Contraindications | personal or family history of MTC or MEN 2 · hypersensitivity | hypersensitivity only |
A cardiovascular claim that is on-label in the US promotes an unlicensed indication in the UK. If you write, review, or check medical copy for both markets, that gap is the whole job — and comparelabels is the only MCP tool that surfaces it.
### Everything else
🔬 14 tools across literature, drug labelling, and clinical trials
🧾 Verifiable by design — results link back to DailyMed, the eMC, PubMed, and ClinicalTrials.gov
📰 Preprints via Europe PMC — surface work ahead of formal publication
🆓 No API keys required (an optional free NCBI key raises PubMed rate limits)
🧪 Fully typed, tested, and CI-checked — literature retrieval gated by OpenGATE, and labelling & trials by the in-repo fidelity benchmark, on every release
Built by PharmaTools.AI.
## 🚀 Quick start (60 seconds)
1. Add PubCrawl to your client config — no install step needed, npx fetches it on first run.
For Claude Desktop, edit claudedesktopconfig.json:
macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claudedesktopconfig.json
Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claudedesktopconfig.json
json
"mcpServers": {
"pubcrawl": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "@pharmatools/pubcrawl"]
2. Restart your client. PubCrawl appears under + → Connectors.
3. Ask away:
> "Compare the US and UK labelling for atorvastatin, and find recent Phase 3 trials for it."
That's it. → More examples · API key & other options
## 🧰 Tools
### 📚 Literature
| Tool | What it does |
| searchpubmed | Search PubMed with filters for date range, article type, and sort order. Returns PMIDs, titles, authors, journals, and DOIs. |
| searcheuropepmc | Search Europe PMC — a broader corpus than PubMed that also indexes preprints (bioRxiv, medRxiv) and patents. Each result includes an abstract snippet, citation count, open-access status, and a preprint flag. Filter to preprints or open-access only. |