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Academic Research MCP — Paper Search, DOIs & Citations (arXiv + Crossref + OpenAlex)

An MCP server for AI agents — and a normal Apify scraper — that turns scholarly metadata into agent-callable tools. Point Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client at it and your agent can run a full literature review: search published papers and the latest preprints, look up a paper by DOI, and trace citations both directions — across Crossref (160M+ works), OpenAlex (240M+ works), and arXiv.

Built for the AI-agent era: clean JSON in, structured results out, no API keys to manage, no HTML scraping.

Why this one

Most research tools on the store hit a single source and only go one direction. This one aggregates three stable scholarly APIs behind a consistent tool set and gives an agent the forward citation graph (who cites a paper), not just its bibliography — so it can ask "what's the newest work building on this?"

• Zero selector rot. Wraps first-party JSON/XML APIs, not scraped HTML — it stays working.
• No keys, no logins. Crossref (CC-BY), OpenAlex (CC0), and arXiv are public, reuse-friendly APIs.
• Fair billing. You're only charged when a tool returns a successful result.

Tools (MCP mode)

Connect (MCP client)

With the actor running in Standby mode, connect your MCP client to:

https://<your-username>--academic-research-mcp.apify.actor/mcp

Use the streamable HTTP transport with an Authorization: Bearer <APIFY_TOKEN> header:

{
"mcpServers":{
"academic-research":{
"url":"https://<your-username>--academic-research-mcp.apify.actor/mcp",
"headers":{"Authorization":"Bearer <APIFY_TOKEN>"}
}
}
}

Then ask your agent things like "Find the most-cited papers on retrieval-augmented generation since 2024, then show me what's cited the top one this year."

Use it as a normal scraper (no MCP)

You can also just Run it with input and get a dataset back:

{"operation":"search_papers","query":"diffusion models","source":"all","fromYear":2024,"maxResults":15}

Other operations: search_preprints (+ category), get_paper_by_doi / get_references / get_citations (+ doi), get_author_works (+ author).

Pricing

Pay-per-event: $0.004 per successful MCP tool call (failed/empty calls are free), or $0.00001 per result in a normal dataset run. A typical 30-call literature-review session costs well under $0.20.

Data sources & terms

• Crossref REST API — public, no auth, metadata under CC-BY.
• OpenAlex API — public, no auth, CC0 data.
• arXiv API — public, no auth; results subject to arXiv's terms.

Public, logged-out data only. No login-gated content, no anti-bot circumvention. Not a medical/clinical data source.

Local development

npminstall
npm run build
# MCP / Standby mode:
APIFY_META_ORIGIN=STANDBY ACTOR_WEB_SERVER_PORT=8080npm run dev
# Standard run (writes to local dataset):
node dist/main.js

Built with Claude Code. Wraps public scholarly APIs; not affiliated with Crossref, OpenAlex, or arXiv.