Academic Research MCP

Scholarly search for AI agents: papers, metadata, preprints and citations behind one MCP endpoint.

Six tools across OpenAlex, Crossref, arXiv, OpenCitations and PubMed. All official public APIs, no scraping targets, no proxy games. Normalized JSON.

Built by The Mine Works.

Tools

Tool	What it returns	Price
search_papers	OpenAlex works: authors, venue, citations, OA status	$0.05 / 25 works
crossref_metadata	Canonical Crossref records: DOIs, journals, dates	$0.05 / 25 works
search_preprints	arXiv preprints with abstracts and PDF links	$0.04 / 25 papers
citation_graph	Who cites a DOI and what it cites (OpenCitations)	$0.04 / 25 records
search_pubmed	PubMed articles with abstracts and MeSH terms	$0.04 / 25 articles
literature_report	Works + metadata + preprints + PubMed, one call	$0.13 complete · $0.08 partial · $0.03/section · $0 nothing found

The report always costs less than calling the tools one by one.

Worked example

Ask your agent: "What does the literature say about CRISPR base editing since 2022?"

// tools/call → literature_report
{ "topic": "CRISPR base editing", "from_year": 2022 }

Returns published_works, canonical_metadata, preprints, and biomedical in one object, most-cited first where the source ranks by citations.

Setup

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "academic-research": {
      "url": "https://themineworks--academic-research-mcp.apify.actor/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" }
    }
  }
}

Works in Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf. Cold start ~8s.

Billing promise

No result, no charge. Ever. A topic with no hits returns an empty, unbilled answer.

Identical repeat calls within 60 seconds are free. Apify platform usage is billed by Apify on top, as with any Standby actor.

Honest limits

• These are metadata and abstract services, not full-text retrieval. PDF links are returned where the source publishes them (arXiv always, OpenAlex when open access).
• Citation counts differ between OpenAlex and Crossref because their corpora differ. That is the sources disagreeing, not a bug.
• PubMed is biomedical only; the report marks that section not-found for out-of-domain topics rather than padding it.

More from The Mine Works

Individual scrapers at apify.com/themineworks. Full MCP suite: themineworks.com/mcp.