The scholar-toolkit-mcp server is a comprehensive academic research toolkit for searching, downloading, reading, and managing papers across 20+ platforms, plus manuscript processing and reference management.

• Multi-Source Paper Search: Unified search (search_papers) across 20+ platforms simultaneously with deduplication — including arXiv, PubMed, bioRxiv, medRxiv, Semantic Scholar, Crossref, OpenAlex, PMC, CORE, Europe PMC, dblp, OpenAIRE, CiteSeerX, DOAJ, BASE, Zenodo, HAL, SSRN, and Unpaywall. Individual source-specific search functions are also available, with filtering by year, sort order, and other parameters.

• Paper Download: Direct PDF downloads from supported platforms (arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, IACR, Semantic Scholar, PMC, CORE, Zenodo, HAL, etc.), plus a robust download_with_fallback chain that tries source-native links → OA repositories → Unpaywall → optional Sci-Hub.

• Paper Reading (Text Extraction): Extract full text from papers for supported sources (arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, IACR, Semantic Scholar, CORE, Europe PMC, Zenodo, HAL, CiteSeerX, DOAJ, BASE, OpenAIRE).

• Manuscript Processing: Process Markdown files with citation placeholders ([@doi:...], [@pmid:...], [@arxiv:...], [@title:...]) to produce numbered Markdown, BibTeX (refs.bib), RIS (refs.ris), and optionally Word documents (.docx via pandoc). Supports citation styles: GB/T 7714-2015, APA 7th, IEEE, Vancouver, and Harvard.

• Paper Metadata & Reference Export: Fetch detailed metadata by DOI, PMID, or arXiv ID (get_paper_metadata), and export reference lists in BibTeX, RIS, or plain text formats.

• Search Cache Management: Search results are automatically cached in .paper_cache/ with a configurable TTL (default: 24 hours). Use cache_list to inspect and cache_clear to purge cached results.

Allows searching and downloading papers from arXiv, a preprint repository for scientific articles.

Allows searching papers from dblp, a computer science bibliography.

Allows searching for academic papers and discovering DOIs via Google Scholar.

Allows searching papers from HAL, an open-access archive for scientific documents.

Enables export of references in RIS format compatible with Mendeley reference manager.

Allows searching and retrieving paper metadata from PubMed, a biomedical literature database.

Allows searching papers via Semantic Scholar with metadata enrichment.

Allows searching papers from SSRN, a repository for social science and humanities preprints.

Allows searching papers from Zenodo, a general-purpose open-access repository.

Enables export of references in RIS and BibTeX formats for import into Zotero.

1. Click on "Install Server".

2. Wait a few minutes for the server to deploy. Once ready, it will show a "Started" state.

3. In the chat, type @ followed by the MCP server name and your instructions, e.g., "@scholar-toolkit-mcp search for papers on federated learning from arxiv"

That's it! The server will respond to your query, and you can continue using it as needed.

Here is a step-by-step guide with screenshots.