Academia MCP

![PyPI](https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/codearkt?label=PyPI package)

A collection of MCP tools related to the search of scientific papers:

ArXiv search and download
ACL Anthology search
HuggingFact datasets search
Semantic Scholar citation graphs
Web search: Exa/Brave/Tavily
Page crawler

Install

Using pip (end users):

pip3 install academia-mcp

For development (uv + Makefile):

uv venv .venv
make install

Examples

Comprehensive report screencast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bweqQcN6w8

Single paper screencast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAAPMptJ5k8

Claude Desktop config

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "academia": {
      "command": "python3",
      "args": [
        "-m",
        "academia_mcp",
        "--transport",
        "stdio"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Running the server (CLI)

uv run -m academia_mcp --transport streamable-http

Notes:

Transports supported: stdio, sse, streamable-http.
Host/port are used for HTTP transports; for stdio they are ignored.

Makefile targets

make install: install the package in editable mode with uv.
make validate: run black, flake8, and mypy (strict).
make test: run the test suite with pytest.
make publish: build and publish using uv.

Environment variables

Set as needed depending on which tools you use:

TAVILY_API_KEY: enables Tavily in web_search.
EXA_API_KEY: enables Exa in web_search and visit_webpage.
BRAVE_API_KEY: enables Brave in web_search.
OPENROUTER_API_KEY: required for document_qa.
BASE_URL: override OpenRouter base URL for document_qa and bitflip tools.
DOCUMENT_QA_MODEL_NAME: override default model for document_qa.
BITFLIP_MODEL_NAME: override default model for bitflip tools.
WORKSPACE_DIR: directory for generated files (PDFs, temp artifacts).

md_to_pdf requirements

The md_to_pdf tool invokes pdflatex. Ensure a LaTeX distribution is installed and pdflatex is on PATH. On Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install texlive-latex-base texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-latex-extra texlive-science

Academia_mcp