scholar-mcp

A scholarly research server for finding papers, patents, books, and technical standards. It connects an AI coding agent to academic-source data.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to find relevant publications, patents, books, and standards, and to work with citation information. It can also download PDFs when read-only mode is disabled.
Why use it?
It reduces the need to search several research databases separately when you need trustworthy sources. An optional Semantic Scholar API key can help avoid strict unauthenticated request limits.

Plugin for Claude Code

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add pvliesdonk/scholar-mcp
agentmods
npx agentmods add plugins/pvliesdonk/scholar-mcp/plugin
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/pvliesdonk/scholar-mcp

Made for: Claude Code.

Per session not measured What this adds to a session before it is invoked.
When invoked not measured Not applicable: nothing here is loaded into a session.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Security

Grade A, and why

scholar-mcp 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 2d ago.

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-plugin/plugin/.claude-plugin/plugin.json · 95 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 95 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

{
  "name": "scholar-mcp",
  "description": "Scholarly-sources MCP server for papers, patents, books, and standards.",
  "version": "1.9.1",
  "author": {
    "name": "Peter van Liesdonk"
  },
  "homepage": "https://pvliesdonk.github.io/scholar-mcp/",
  "repository": "https://github.com/pvliesdonk/scholar-mcp",
  "license": "MIT",
  "keywords": [
    "scholar",
    "papers",
    "patents",
    "books",
    "standards",
    "citations",
    "mcp"
  ],
  "userConfig": {
    "s2_api_key": {
      "type": "string",
      "title": "Semantic Scholar API key",
      "description": "Semantic Scholar API key. Optional but strongly recommended: unauthenticated requests are limited to ~1 req/s. Request one at https://www.semanticscholar.org/product/api#api-key-form.",
      "required": false,
      "sensitive": true
    },
    "read_only": {
      "type": "boolean",
      "title": "Read-only mode",
      "description": "When true, write-tagged tools (PDF download and conversion cache writes) are hidden. Set false to enable them.",
      "required": false,
      "default": true
    },
    "cache_dir": {
      "type": "directory",
      "title": "Cache directory",
      "description": "Directory for the SQLite cache database (cache.db) and downloaded PDFs (pdfs/, md/).",
      "required": false
    },
    "contact_email": {
      "type": "string",
      "title": "Contact email",
      "description": "Contact email for the OpenAlex polite pool (improves rate limits). Also enables Unpaywall lookups as a PDF fallback source.",
      "required": false
    },
    "docling_url": {
      "type": "string",
      "title": "docling-serve URL",
      "description": "Base URL of a running docling-serve instance for PDF conversion (e.g. http://localhost:5001). When unset, PDF conversion tools return an error.",
      "required": false
    },
    "vlm_api_url": {
      "type": "string",
      "title": "VLM API URL",
      "description": "OpenAI-compatible VLM endpoint for formula and figure e

Read the full file on GitHub · 95 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. 2d ago First seen · 95 lines scan A 7bb6618614a9

Subscribe to this mod's changes

scholar-mcp is a plugin published in the GitHub repository pvliesdonk/scholar-mcp (2 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. Its token cost is not measured: this kind of file is read by the harness, not the model. 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.