Academix MCP

A remote MCP server for academic paper search, deployed on Cloudflare Workers. Aggregates results from multiple academic databases with PDF storage and full-text search.

Data Sources

Source	Auth	Coverage
OpenAlex	Free (email for polite pool)	240M+ works
Semantic Scholar	Free (API key for higher limits)	AI-powered recommendations
DBLP	Free	CS papers, native BibTeX
CrossRef	Free (email for polite pool)	DOI resolution
arXiv	Free	Preprints
Google Scholar	SerpAPI key ($75/mo)	Optional, broadest coverage

Tools (11 total)

Search & Discovery

• academic_search_papers — search across all sources with filters (author, year, venue, DOI)
• academic_get_paper_details — get full metadata by DOI, arXiv ID, OpenAlex ID, or DBLP key
• academic_search_author — find papers by author name
• academic_get_related_papers — AI-powered recommendations via Semantic Scholar
• academic_get_citations — get papers that cite a given paper
• academic_get_citation_network — graph data (nodes/edges) for visualization

Export

• academic_get_bibtex — export BibTeX citations (single or batch)

PDF Storage & Search

• academic_save_pdf — download PDF, extract text, store in R2, index in D1
• academic_list_pdfs — list stored PDFs
• academic_search_stored — full-text search across extracted PDF text
• academic_verify_citation — verify if a sentence appears in any stored paper

Setup

npm install

Local development

# Create .dev.vars with your secrets
echo 'SERPAPI_API_KEY=your_key' > .dev.vars
echo 'ACADEMIX_EMAIL=you@example.com' >> .dev.vars

npm run dev

Deploy to Cloudflare

# Create resources
npx wrangler r2 bucket create academix-papers
npx wrangler d1 create academix-index
# Update database_id in wrangler.jsonc

# Apply D1 schema
npx wrangler d1 execute academix-index --remote --file=schema.sql

# Set secrets
npx wrangler secret put SERPAPI_API_KEY
npx wrangler secret put ACADEMIX_EMAIL

# Optional paid PDF downloads
npx wrangler secret put OPENALEX_API_KEY

# Deploy
npm run deploy

Add to Claude Code

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "academix": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["mcp-remote", "https://your-worker.workers.dev/mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Testing

npm run dev          # terminal 1
npm test             # terminal 2

# Against production
npx tsx test.ts https://your-worker.workers.dev

# With Google Scholar
SERPAPI_API_KEY=xxx npm test

Architecture

• Cloudflare Workers — serverless runtime
• Durable Objects — MCP session management
• R2 — PDF and extracted text storage
• D1 — paper metadata index with FTS5 full-text search
• unpdf — edge-compatible PDF text extraction

Based on

TypeScript port of Academix (Python), extended with R2/D1 storage, Google Scholar, and citation verification.