mcp-scholarly MCP server

A MCP server to search for accurate academic articles. More scholarly vendors will be added soon.

Components

Tools

The server implements one tool:

• search-arxiv: Search arxiv for articles related to the given keyword.
  • Takes "keyword" as required string arguments

Quickstart

Install

Claude Desktop

On MacOS: ~/Library/Application\ Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json On Windows: %APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

Development/Unpublished Servers Configuration

"mcpServers": {
  "mcp-scholarly": {
    "command": "uv",
    "args": [
      "--directory",
      "/Users/adityakarnam/PycharmProjects/mcp-scholarly/mcp-scholarly",
      "run",
      "mcp-scholarly"
    ]
  }
}

Published Servers Configuration

"mcpServers": {
  "mcp-scholarly": {
    "command": "uvx",
    "args": [
      "mcp-scholarly"
    ]
  }
}

or if you are using Docker

Published Docker Servers Configuration

"mcpServers": {
  "mcp-scholarly": {
    "command": "docker",
    "args": [
      "run", "--rm", "-i",
      "mcp/scholarly"
    ]
  }
}

Installing via Smithery

To install mcp-scholarly for Claude Desktop automatically via Smithery:

npx -y @smithery/cli install mcp-scholarly --client claude

Development

Building and Publishing

To prepare the package for distribution:

1. Sync dependencies and update lockfile:

uv sync

2. Build package distributions:

uv build

This will create source and wheel distributions in the dist/ directory.

3. Publish to PyPI:

uv publish

Note: You'll need to set PyPI credentials via environment variables or command flags:

• Token: --token or UV_PUBLISH_TOKEN
• Or username/password: --username/UV_PUBLISH_USERNAME and --password/UV_PUBLISH_PASSWORD

Debugging

Since MCP servers run over stdio, debugging can be challenging. For the best debugging experience, we strongly recommend using the MCP Inspector.

You can launch the MCP Inspector via npm with this command:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector uv --directory /Users/adityakarnam/PycharmProjects/mcp-scholarly/mcp-scholarly run mcp-scholarly

Upon launching, the Inspector will display a URL that you can access in your browser to begin debugging.