Academic Research Intelligence MCP Server

Connect Academic Research Intelligence MCP to Claude, Cursor or any other MCP client and it stops being a tab you switch to. Academic paper search, scientific literature, citation analysis, arXiv & semantic related-work. The academic research intelligence mcp mcp server is what makes that connection.

What the server does

Daily (~4am PT): OpenAlex (primary, keyless, rich metadata + citations), arXiv (CS/physics/math/bio preprints), PubMed (biomed). Abstracts are embedded with fastembed (bge-small) for similar_papers (pgvector cosine). citation_graph and author_profile resolve live from OpenAlex. Semantic Scholar is an optional enhancement (TLDR/relevance via S2_API_KEY; keyless S2 rate-limits hard).

Available tools

The toolset is worth reading before you wire it up, because it tells you what the integration is really for:

• search_papers — $0.01
• paper_detail — free
• citation_graph — $0.01
• author_profile — $0.01
• trending_research — $0.01
• similar_papers — $0.05
• daily_brief — $10
• brief_summary — $0.50
• mint_info — free

Credentials and setup notes

Configuration is passed through the environment: S2_API_KEY. Treat anything key-shaped as a real credential — scope it to the minimum the server needs, and rotate it if it ever lands in a shared config.

Installation

Setup follows the usual MCP pattern — install or clone the server, register it in your client's configuration file, restart the client. The configuration blocks on this page cover the common clients.

Where it fits

This sits in the developer tooling group, where several servers overlap in what they claim to do but differ sharply once you actually set them up. Academic Research Intelligence MCP's toolset — search_papers, paper_detail, citation_graph and 6 more — is a fair guide to whether it matches your workflow. It is maintained by FoundryNet; worth a glance at recent repository activity before you build anything load-bearing on it.

This entry was verified against Academic Research Intelligence MCP's own documentation before publication; SyncDev keeps the directory reviewed rather than auto-generated.

Worth knowing first

• It runs with your machine's permissions. That is convenient and also the reason to think about what you point it at before you approve a tool call.
• With 9 tools registered it takes up a noticeable share of the context window; turn it off in projects that never touch Academic Research Intelligence MCP.
• Missing credentials fail quietly in some clients — if no tools show up, check the environment block first.
• Keep per-call confirmation enabled while you learn its behaviour; it is the cheapest safeguard you have.