Google Scholar

What Google Scholar does

The Google Scholar MCP server exposes Google Scholar research queries through the Model Context Protocol. It is intended for agents that need to find academic literature, inspect citation information, look up researchers, or retrieve paper abstracts without requiring a separate manual search step.

Search results can include a paper title, authors, citation count, abstract, PDF link, and publication year. The available data supports tasks such as finding highly cited work on a subject, checking an author’s profile and h-index, and locating recent publications about a technical topic.

Typical requests include identifying influential papers on transformer architectures, checking Yoshua Bengio’s author profile, or searching for recent research about retrieval performance in retrieval-augmented generation systems.

How it works

This is a remote MCP server backed by the Apify-hosted Google Scholar API tool. An MCP-compatible client connects to the Apify MCP endpoint and sends Google Scholar requests as tool calls. Results are returned as structured JSON for the client or agent to interpret.

Authentication uses an Apify account. Clients can authenticate with an Apify API token, while Cursor can also use an OAuth sign-in flow. The remote endpoint selects the johnvc/google-scholar-api tool through its URL parameters.

Its operation depends on the remote Apify endpoint and the Google Scholar API tool it exposes.

Setup and configuration

The token can be obtained from the Apify account integrations page.

Claude Desktop needs a stdio bridge because it does not connect to remote MCP servers directly in the documented setup. Configure mcp-remote with the Apify MCP URL and pass the token as an Authorization: Bearer header, then restart Claude Desktop.

Cursor supports the remote endpoint directly. Add the endpoint to .cursor/mcp.json either without credentials to use the browser-based Apify OAuth flow, or with an authorization header containing the Apify token.

The documentation names Claude Desktop and Cursor specifically. Other MCP clients may require their own remote-server or authentication configuration, which is not provided here.

Tools and capabilities

The documented capabilities are:

• Search Google Scholar for academic papers
• Retrieve citation counts
• Fetch author profiles
• Read paper abstracts
• Return structured paper metadata

These capabilities fit literature reviews, citation tracking, prior-art research, and open-ended questions about published work. The supplied examples also show filtering searches by publication recency and requesting highly cited results.

Limitations and notes

The Google Scholar MCP server relies on Apify for access and authentication, so requests require a working connection to the remote endpoint. Token authentication requires an Apify API token, although Cursor’s documented OAuth option avoids manually supplying one.

A PDF link may be included in returned paper data, but the documentation does not claim that the server fetches or parses the linked document.

Claude Desktop requires the documented stdio bridge for this remote service. Cursor has native remote MCP support in the provided setup instructions.