Paper Search MCP

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for searching and downloading academic papers from multiple sources. The project follows a free-first strategy: prioritize open and public data sources, support optional API keys when they improve stability or coverage, and keep source-specific connectors extensible for advanced users.

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Project Principles
• MCP Authorization Compatibility
• Features
• Source Strategy
• Sci-Hub Notice
• Installation
  • Claude Code (Skill)
  • Method 1 — Smithery
  • Method 2 — uvx
  • Method 3 — uv
  • Method 4 — pip
  • Method 5 — npx
  • Method 6 — Docker
  • Method 7 — Clone & run from source
  • DeepSeek Harness (DSH)
  • Environment Variables
• Contributing
• Demo
• Star History
• License
• TODO

Overview

paper-search-mcp is a Python-based tool for searching and downloading academic papers from various platforms. It provides tools for searching papers, downloading PDFs, and extracting text, making it ideal for researchers and AI-driven workflows. It can be used as an MCP server (for Claude Desktop and other MCP clients) or as a Claude Code skill with a CLI interface.

Project Principles

• Free-First: Public and open sources are the default roadmap. Paid or restricted sources are not the core direction of this project.
• Optional API Keys: API keys are supported only when they improve stability, rate limits, or metadata quality. The MCP should still be usable without them whenever possible.
• LLM-Friendly Retrieval: Search results should be standardized, deduplicated, and as complete as possible for downstream LLM workflows.
• Source Transparency: Different sources have different strengths. The MCP should make those tradeoffs explicit instead of pretending every source supports full-text retrieval.

MCP Authorization Compatibility

The bundled MCP server supports stdio (the default), sse, and streamable-http. Network transports bind to 127.0.0.1 by default. Optional OAuth protected-resource mode adds standard discovery, JWT bearer-token validation and required scopes to both HTTP transports, using an external authorization server.

Enable it with --auth oauth or PAPER_SEARCH_MCP_AUTH=oauth and the explicit issuer/JWKS/resource/audience/scope configuration in OAuth protected-resource setup. Invalid or incomplete HTTP auth settings fail startup. stdio remains independent of HTTP authentication. Local HTTP without OAuth configuration remains open; do not publish that listener directly. A protected remote deployment still needs TLS, rate limits and filesystem isolation. This feature does not host login/accounts or replace the external issuer's OAuth flow; live identity-provider interoperability must be validated for your deployment.

Features

• Two-Layer Architecture:
  • Layer 1 (Unified Tooling): High-level search_papers for multi-source concurrent search & deduplication, and `downl

... View full README on GitHub