adityak74/mcp-scholarly

A MCP server to search for accurate academic articles. More scholarly vendors will be added soon.
Search tools
- search-arxiv — arXiv search (no key needed)
- search-google-scholar — Google Scholar via the scholarly library (free proxy pool)
- search-google-web — Google web search via the SerpBase API. Optional; only registered when SERPBASE_API_KEY is set. Get a key at https://serpbase.dev/dashboard/api-keys (free tier available).
Components
Tools
The server implements one tool:
- search-arxiv: Search arxiv for articles related to the given keyword.
- Takes "keyword" as required string arguments
Quickstart
Install
Claude Desktop
On MacOS: ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
On Windows: %APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
Development/Unpublished Servers Configuration
Published Servers Configuration
or if you are using Docker
Published Docker Servers Configuration
Installing via Smithery
To install mcp-scholarly for Claude Desktop automatically via Smithery:
Development
Building and Publishing
To prepare the package for distribution:
1. Sync dependencies and update lockfile:
2. Build package distributions:
This will create source and wheel distributions in the dist/ directory.
3. Publish to PyPI:
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, we strongly recommend using the MCP Inspector.
You can launch the MCP Inspector via npm with this command:
Upon launching, the Inspector will display a URL that you can access in your browser to begin debugging.
Using with zorp
zorp needs a search-capable MCP tool
before validate will run. This server satisfies that check, because zorp
matches on a search verb in the tool name and these tools are called
search-arxiv and search-google-scholar.
Or configure it once, so every run picks it up:
Notes measured against zorp's transport, not assumed:
- search-arxiv answers in about 1 second. zorp's default stdio read
budget is 30 seconds, so the default is comfortable. timeout_secs = 60
above is headroom for search-google-scholar, which goes through
scholarly and a free proxy pool and is far less predictable.