Google Scholar MCP Server

A hosted Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that gives Claude, Cursor, Windsurf and any other MCP client two read-only Google Scholar tools. Search the literature with Scholar's own operators, year ranges and cited-by lookups, then pull a paper's citation in five styles with its BibTeX and EndNote export links, both as structured JSON, with nothing to host.

It reads public Google Scholar pages that a signed-out visitor can see.

1,000 free credits every month, no card required, which is 100 Scholar calls at the 10-credit rate.

https://mcp.hasdata.com/mcp?apis=google_scholar

Contents

• What you need
• Quick start
• Example prompts
• Tools
• Errors and failure paths
• Pricing, free tier and limits
• Tool selection
• How it compares
• FAQ
• HasData links
• Development
• Contributing
• License

What you need

An MCP client and a HasData API key from the dashboard, free to create with no card, and the free tier covers about 100 calls a month at the 10-credit rate. This is a remote server, so the simplest path is a URL and an x-api-key header, with no container to run. A client that only speaks stdio reaches it through a thin launcher, published as @hasdata/google-scholar-mcp on npm and hasdata-google-scholar-mcp on PyPI, shown below.

Quick start

The server URL is the same for every client. We run it hands-on in Claude Code and Claude Desktop. The other blocks follow each client's own documented format for a remote server.

Clients with OAuth support can add the same URL as a connector and sign in without putting a key in a config file.

claude mcp add --transport http google-scholar "https://mcp.hasdata.com/mcp?apis=google_scholar" \
  --header "x-api-key: HASDATA_API_KEY"

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "google-scholar": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@hasdata/google-scholar-mcp"],
      "env": { "HASDATA_API_KEY": "YOUR_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "google-scholar": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["hasdata-google-scholar-mcp"],
      "env": { "HASDATA_API_KEY": "YOUR_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "google-scholar": {
      "url": "https://mcp.hasdata.com/mcp?apis=google_scholar",
      "headers": { "x-api-key": "HASDATA_API_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "google-scholar": {
      "serverUrl": "https://mcp.hasdata.com/mcp?apis=google_scholar",
      "headers": { "x-api-key": "HASDATA_API_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

{
  "servers": {
    "google-scholar": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://mcp.hasdata.com/mcp?apis=google_scholar",
      "headers": { "x-api-key": "HASDATA_API_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

Example prompts

Each of these lands on one tool, or on two in sequence when the second needs an id the first returns.

• Find papers on transformer architectures published since 2023 and sort them by citation count.
• Who has cited this paper, and how has that grown year on year?
• Give me the BibTeX for this paper.
• Find review articles only on this topic, excluding citations without full records.
• Show me every indexed version of this paper and which of them have a PDF.
• Find recent work by this author on this topic.

A prompt naming a paper takes two calls, one search to reach its resultId and one citation lookup. A prompt about who cites a paper also takes two, because the second call reuses citedBy.citesId from the first.

Tools

Two tools, 10 credits per successful call.

Get Scholar search results

hasdata_google_scholar_scholar_getScholarSearchResults

A page of Scholar results.

Returns searchInformation with totalResults, queryDisplayed and the time Scholar reported, an organicResults array, and pagination.

Each result carries position, resultId, title, link, snippet, a publicationInfo object, a resources array, citedBy, versions, relatedPagesLink and citeHasdataLink.

publicationInfo.authors is the part worth knowing about. Alongside the raw summary line it lists the authors Scholar has profiles for, each with a name, a profile link and an authorId, which is how you follow one author rather than parsing a byline.

citedBy and versions are the two ids that make this tool compose with itself. citedBy.citesId goes back into cites to walk a citation graph, and versions.clusterId goes into cluster to see every indexed copy of the same paper.

{
  "position": 1,
  "resultId": "A7L9JolPKkoJ",
  "title": "A historical survey of advances in transformer architectures",
  "link": "https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/14/10/4316",
  "snippet": "… of the Vision Transformer (ViT) opening a new realm of architectures which build … transformer architecture, it becomes pertinent to examine in detail the architecture of the transformer …",
  "publicationInfo": {
    "summary": "AR Sajun, I Zualkernan, D Sankalpa - Applied Sciences, 2024 - mdpi.com",
    "authors": [
      { "name": "AR Sajun", "authorId": "k6zWX4EAAAAJ", "link": "https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=k6zWX4EAAAAJ&hl=en" }
    ]
  },
  "resources": [{ "fileFormat": "Html", "title": "mdpi.com", "link": "https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/14/10/4316" }],
  "citedBy": { "total": 97, "citesId": "5344171358311789059" },
  "versions": { "total": 7, "clusterId": "5344171358311789059" }
}

Get Scholar citation formats

hasdata_google_scholar_cite_getScholarCitationFormats

The citation block for one paper.