academic-tools-mcp: Instructions file for Claude Code

CLAUDE.md

academic-tools-mcp CLAUDE.md is an instructions file for Claude Code from hunter-heidenreich/academic-tools-mcp. It costs 1,007 tokens per session, scanned A, original, MIT.

Development instructions for an MCP server that provides academic-paper tools. It connects to sources such as OpenAlex, arXiv, bioRxiv and medRxiv, which publish or index research papers and preprints.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when changing this academic research server, including its paper-search tools, metadata checks, author and institution lookups, BibTeX citations, and citation or reference graphs.
Why use it?
It gives coding agents clear rules for running tests, formatting and type-checking code, and maintaining versions while working on the server.

Instructions file for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: the file is CLAUDE.md. Also seen: mentions CLAUDE.md.

This is hunter-heidenreich/academic-tools-mcp's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on academic-tools-mcp itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything academic-tools-mcp configures →

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to hunter-heidenreich/academic-tools-mcp. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hunter-heidenreich/academic-tools-mcp/main/CLAUDE.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hunter-heidenreich/academic-tools-mcp

Made for: Claude Code.

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Per session 1,007 This file is loaded in full into every session.
When invoked 1,007 The same file — it is already loaded in full.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.01007 $0.01007
Opus 5 $0.00504 $0.00504
Sonnet 5 $0.00201 $0.00201
Haiku 4.5 $0.00101 $0.00101

Measured yesterday against content hash e93825f28a45, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

academic-tools-mcp CLAUDE.md scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

CLAUDE.md · 82 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 82 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

CLAUDE.md

What This Is

A FastMCP-based MCP server wrapping academic APIs (see README.md for the provider table). It exists primarily to support an academic notes/blog workflow: verifying paper metadata, authors, and institutions, generating BibTeX, and exploring reference/citation graphs.

Commands

uv run pytest -v                                                 # Run the test suite
uv run python -m academic_tools_mcp.server                       # Run the MCP server
ENABLE_DEBUG_TOOLS=1 uv run python -m academic_tools_mcp.server  # + the get_server_stats tool

Changelog & versioning

Before opening a PR, add a bullet to ## [Unreleased] in CHANGELOG.md (Keep a Changelog format) under the right Added / Changed / Fixed / Removed heading, referencing the PR number (e.g. ([#12])) with a matching link definition at the bottom of the file. Skip only for changes with no user-facing effect (pure refactors, internal docs, test-only edits).

Releases are cut deliberately, not per-merge. Calendar versioning: rename [Unreleased] to ## [YYYY.MM.DD] — YYYY-MM-DD, bump version in pyproject.toml to match (PEP 440 drops leading zeros: tag v2026.05.29 ↔ version 2026.5.29), and tag the commit vYYYY.MM.DD.

Where the detail lives

Design detail lives in .claude/rules/*.md, each auto-loading from its own paths: frontmatter when you touch a matching file. Those files state only what a docstring beside the code cannot: cross-module contracts, upstream API facts, accepted limitations, and prohibitions.

File Loads for
python-design.md every .py under src/ — layering, naming, single-homed infrastructure
testing.md tests/**
net.md · store.md · download.md net/ · store/ · download/
providers.md providers/*
pipeline.md papers/*, manual.py, fast_extract.py
server.md · bibtex.md · corpus.md · util.md server.py + app.py + tools/* · bibtex.py · corpus.py · util/*

Read the full file on GitHub · 82 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday Changed · +26 lines · -388 tokens per session e93825f28a45
  2. 2d ago Changed · +2 lines · +113 tokens per session 432cebc52491
  3. 3d ago Changed · +1 lines · +111 tokens per session 5fda2f1b911f
  4. 4d ago Changed · -100 lines · -3,035 tokens per session 3e1e113dd254
  5. 11d ago First seen · 153 lines · 4,206 tokens per session scan A 5208caa05ea3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

academic-tools-mcp CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository hunter-heidenreich/academic-tools-mcp (5 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 1,007 tokens to every session, about $0.0050 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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