🔍 Enable AI assistants to search and access academic paper metadata through Crossref using a simple MCP interface.

The Crossref MCP Server provides a bridge between AI assistants and Crossref's database of academic literature through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It allows AI models to search for scientific articles by DOI, title, or keywords, access their metadata, and retrieve journal and funder information in a programmatic way.

• 🔎 Work Search by Query: Find papers using keywords, titles, or authors ✅
• 📊 Metadata Access: Retrieve detailed metadata for specific papers by DOI ✅
• 📚 Journal Search: Find journals in the Crossref database ✅
• 💰 Funder Search: Discover funding organizations and their supported research ✅

• Python 3.10+
• FastMCP library

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/JackKuo666/Crossref-MCP-Server.git
   cd Crossref-MCP-Server
   

2. Install the required dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt
   

Start the MCP server:

python crossref_server.py

Add this configuration to your cline_mcp_settings.json or claude_desktop_config.json:

(Mac OS)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "crossref": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["-m", "crossref_server.py"]
      }
  }
}

(Windows version):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "crossref": {
      "command": "C:\\Users\\YOUR\\PATH\\miniconda3\\envs\\mcp_server\\python.exe",
      "args": [
        "D:\\code\\YOUR\\PATH\\Crossref-MCP-Server\\crossref_server.py"
      ],
      "env": {},
      "disabled": false,
      "autoApprove": []
    }
  }
}

The Crossref MCP Server provides the following tools:

1. search_works_by_query: Search for scholarly works using keywords, titles, or authors.
2. get_work_metadata: Get detailed metadata for a specific work using its DOI.
3. search_journals: Search for journals in the Crossref database.
4. search_funders: Search for funding organizations in the Crossref database.

You can ask the AI assistant to search for papers using keywords:

Can you search Crossref for papers about "machine learning in healthcare"?

You can get detailed metadata for a specific paper using its DOI:

Can you show me the metadata for the paper with DOI 10.1038/nature14539?

You can search for journals in the Crossref database:

Can you find journals related to "artificial intelligence" in Crossref?

You can search for funding organizations:

Can you find information about the "National Science Foundation" in Crossref?

• crossref_server.py: The main MCP server implementation using FastMCP
• crossref_search.py: Contains the logic for searching Crossref and retrieving metadata

• Python 3.10+
• FastMCP (mcp)
• requests
• bs4
• habanero

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

This tool uses the Crossref API to access publicly available metadata about academic works. For better API access priority, it's recommended to provide your email address when initializing the CrossrefSearch class.