Polymath MCP

An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that aggregates free, keyless research sources for computer science, computer engineering, electronics and IT.

One server, one normalized output format, seventeen data sources. Every source works without an API key and without payment. Results from different sources are merged and deduplicated by DOI and arXiv id, so the same paper found on arXiv, Crossref and OpenAlex comes back as a single record that combines the best fields of each.

Why

Research data is scattered across many APIs, each with its own format, quirks and rate limits. Existing MCP servers each cover one slice. Polymath gives an agent a single interface where a paper, its open-access PDF, its citation count, its implementation on GitHub, the model trained from it on Hugging Face and the practical discussion around it on Hacker News or Stack Exchange are all one tool call apart.

Related MCP server: Academic Paper MCP HTTP/SSE Server

Tools

Every search response is an envelope with results, sources_ok and sources_failed. Partial failure is the normal case for an aggregator: when a source is down or rate-limited, the others still answer and the envelope says exactly which sources contributed.

Installation

Requires Python 3.11+.

pip install git+https://github.com/Moreti2002/polymath-mcp

Or from a clone:

git clone https://github.com/Moreti2002/polymath-mcp
cd polymath-mcp
pip install .

Claude Code

claude mcp add polymath -- polymath-mcp

Claude Desktop / other MCP clients

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "polymath": {
      "command": "polymath-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Configuration

No API keys are needed. One optional environment variable:

• POLYMATH_EMAIL: a real contact e-mail. Unlocks the Unpaywall source (which requires it) and puts Crossref requests in its polite pool with better rate limits. Without it everything else still works.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "polymath": {
      "command": "polymath-mcp",
      "env": { "POLYMATH_EMAIL": "you@example.com" }
    }
  }
}

Sources and their limits

All limits below are for keyless access, as observed in practice.

The server caches responses in memory and throttles each source to stay within these limits. Sources with hard daily budgets (Stack Exchange, OpenAlex search) are cached the longest.

Known coverage gaps

• There is no legitimate keyless API for commercial electronic component catalogs (Octopart/Nexar, Digi-Key and Mouser all require credentials). search_components covers what keyless sources can: scanned datasheets on the Internet Archive and KiCad symbol libraries. For part selection discussion, search_trends includes the Electronics Stack Exchange.

• Papers with Code shut down in 2025; its role is covered by the Hugging Face Papers source.

• Semantic Scholar without a key shares a global anonymous pool and fails often. It is wired as best-effort and never blocks a search.

Architecture

src/polymath/
  server.py        MCP server and tool definitions
  models.py        normalized result models (Paper, CodeRepo, HubItem, ...)
  aggregate.py     concurrent fan-out with per-source failure isolation
  dedupe.py        cross-source paper merging (DOI, arXiv id, title)
  http.py          shared HTTP client, retries, per-source throttling
  cache.py         in-memory TTL cache
  providers/       one module per source, registered in a plug-in registry

Adding a source is one file: subclass Provider (or PaperLookupProvider), map the API response to the normalized models, decorate the class with @register. The aggregator, dedupe and MCP tools pick it up automatically.

Development

python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"

pytest -m "not live"   # offline tests (mocked HTTP)
pytest -m live         # integration tests against the real APIs

Offline tests must always pass. Live tests depend on third-party services and may fail when a source is down or rate-limited; CI runs them as non-blocking.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.