Student Citations MCP

Citations MCP

Paste a DOI, an ISBN or an arXiv ID into your AI app and get a formatted citation back in APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago author date, Harvard or IEEE, ready to paste into your works cited list. It is a citation generator that runs inside the app you are already writing in, so there is no web page to fill in and no account to create. You can also type the details yourself, or give the DOI or the ISBN, and get the matching in text citation, either in brackets or in the narrative form for a sentence where you name the author. Give several sources in one call and you get them back as an alphabetised works cited list. The wording and punctuation come from tested code, so they are the same every time. Free and open source, no account, no key and nothing stored. It works with Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, VS Code Copilot and any other app that supports MCP.

Citations MCP compared with BibGuru and Citation Machine

BibGuru and Citation Machine are web pages you fill in and copy from. Citations MCP sits inside the AI app you are already writing in, and it takes a DOI or an ISBN as well as typed details. Here is the side by side.

Both other tools cover many more styles than this one does. What you get here is a citation in the chat you are writing in, from a DOI or an ISBN, with nothing to sign up for.

Citations MCP compared with the Zotero MCP servers

The other MCP servers for citations are the Zotero ones: zotero-mcp, @oscardvs/zoteus and @xbghc/zotero-mcp. They are the closer competition, because they run inside your app as well. They are also built around a library you keep in Zotero, so they ask more of you first. Here is the side by side.

All three are open source under the MIT license, as this one is. Two of them talk to the Zotero desktop app, so you install Zotero and keep it running while you work. The third goes through the Zotero web API, so you sign in at zotero.org and paste an API key and your user ID.

That is the trade. The Zotero servers do more with a library you already keep. They search it, read your PDFs, give you a passage with its page number and write notes and tags back into it. Citations MCP covers the other half of the job. You give it a DOI, an ISBN or the details of a source, and it gives you the citation and the in text form, in the chat, with nothing to install, no account and nothing stored. If your course needs one of the many styles Zotero can produce, take one of the Zotero servers. If you need the reference for one essay, this is the shorter path.

Each project keeps its own setup guide: cookjohn/zotero-mcp, oscardvs/zoteus and xbghc/zotero-mcp.

Paste ready output

Here is the same paper in all three styles, with the in text citation and the narrative form for each one. The narrative form is for a sentence where you name the author, as in "LeCun et al. (2015, p. 436) argue that ...". Copy the lines you need.

Deep learning

LeCun, Yann, Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton Nature, 2015, volume 521, issue 7553, pages 436 to 444 DOI 10.1038/nature14539

APA 7 LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., & Hinton, G. (2015). Deep learning. *Nature*, *521*(7553), 436-444. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539 In text: (LeCun et al., 2015, p. 436) Narrative: LeCun et al. (2015, p. 436)

MLA 9 LeCun, Yann, et al. "Deep learning." *Nature*, vol. 521, no. 7553, 2015, pp. 436-444, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539. In text: (LeCun et al. 436) Narrative: LeCun et al. (436)

Chicago author date LeCun, Yann, et al. 2015. "Deep learning." *Nature* 521 (7553): 436-444. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539. In text: (LeCun et al. 2015, 436) Narrative: LeCun et al. (2015, 436)

All three styles at once

If you are comparing styles, pass style as all to format_citation, cite_from_doi, cite_from_isbn or cite_from_arxiv. You get one labelled citation for APA 7, MLA 9 and Chicago author date in one reply, instead of three calls. The label above each citation is the style name, so you can pick the one you want. format_bibliography and in_text_citation still take one style at a time.

BibTeX

Pass style as bibtex to format_citation, format_bibliography, cite_from_doi, cite_from_isbn, cite_from_arxiv or cite_from_url to get a .bib entry instead of a formatted citation. Each entry gets a cite key built from the first author's family name and the year, or from the title and the year when there is no author, and format_bibliography returns one entry after another in the order you give the sources, separated by blank lines. Paste the result into a .bib file or import it into a reference manager.

@article{lecun2015,

author = {LeCun, Yann and Bengio, Yoshua and Hinton, Geoffrey}, title = {Deep learning}, journal = {Nature}, year = {2015}, volume = {521}, number = {7553}, pages = {436--444}, doi = {10.1038/nature14539} }

BibTeX is an entry format, so there is no in text form for it. Use APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago author date, Harvard or IEEE for the in text citation.

RIS

Pass style as ris to format_citation, format_bibliography, cite_from_doi, cite_from_isbn, cite_from_arxiv or cite_from_url to get a RIS record instead of a formatted citation. Zotero, EndNote and Mendeley import RIS. format_bibliography returns one record after another in the order you give the sources, separated by blank lines. Like BibTeX, RIS has no in text form.

Install

npx -y student-citations-mcp

Nothing else to install. You need Node.js 20 or newer. The config block for your app is further down this page.

Tools

All eight tools are read only.

Prompts

| cite_this | Start a citation in APA 7, MLA 9 or Chicago author date from a DOI, an ISBN or details you type. It fills in the wording the tools use, so you can edit the source and send i