Google Scholar MCP

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for querying Google Scholar via AI agents. This server enables language models to retrieve academic metadata, citation counts, and author profiles directly within their context window using the open-source scholarly package (no API keys required).

Features

This server exposes the following tools to the connected AI client:

• search_author: Finds an author by name and returns their affiliation, total citations, and h-index.

• search_paper: Finds a specific paper by title and returns its abstract, citations, authors, and URL.

• get_author_papers: Retrieves a list of the most cited papers by a specific author.

Related MCP server: mcp-semanticscholar

Prerequisites

• Python 3.10 or higher (Required by the official mcp SDK)

• The uv package manager (recommended) or standard pip.

Installation

1. Clone this repository to your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/FunmiLS/google_scholar_mcp.git
cd google_scholar_mcp

2. Run the server using uv (Recommended):

uv run custom-scholar

Alternatively, you can install it using standard pip:

python3.10 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .
custom-scholar

Integration with Claude Desktop

To utilise this server within Claude Desktop, add the following to your claude_desktop_config.json file.

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

• Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "google-scholar": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": [
        "--directory",
        "/absolute/path/to/google_scholar_mcp",
        "run",
        "custom-scholar"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Note: Google Scholar frequently rate-limits automated requests. Since this uses scholarly, basic blocks are usually handled, but if you do heavy scraping, Scholar might temporarily block your IP.

Project Structure

google_scholar_mcp/
├── .gitignore              
├── pyproject.toml          
├── README.md               
├── LICENSE
├── tests/
│   └── test_tools.py
└── src/
    └── google_scholar_mcp/
        ├── __init__.py
        ├── main.py         
        └── tools.py        

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Author

Funmi Looi-Somoye