HasData Google Scholar

Google Scholar MCP Server

A hosted Google Scholar 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

• Prompts and resources

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 Code

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

--header "x-api-key: HASDATA_API_KEY"

Claude Desktop

Settings, then Connectors, then Add custom connector, then paste https://mcp.hasdata.com/mcp?apis=google_scholar and sign in.

For the config-file route, Claude Desktop loads only local (stdio) servers, so it reaches a remote server through a stdio launcher. The @hasdata/google-scholar-mcp package is that launcher, and it reads the key from the environment. Add this to claude_desktop_config.json:

{

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

For Python instead of Node, swap the launcher for the PyPI package, which uvx runs without a manual install:

{

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

Cursor

~/.cursor/mcp.json for every project, or .cursor/mcp.json for one:

{

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

Windsurf

~/.codeium/windsurf/mcp_config.json. Windsurf calls the field serverUrl, not url:

{

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

VS Code

.vscode/mcp.json in the workspace:

{

"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

Three 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.

Returns citations, the formatted string in MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard and Vancouver, and links, the export URLs for BibTeX, EndNote, RefMan and RefWorks.

{

"citations": [ { "title": "APA", "snippet": "Sajun, A. R., Zualkernan, I., & Sankalpa, D. (2024). A historical survey of advances in transformer architectures. Applied Sciences, 14(10), 4316." } ], "links": [ { "name": "BibTeX", "link": "https://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar.bib?q=info:A7L9JolPKkoJ:scholar.google.com/&output=citation..." } ] }

Get a case law opinion

hasdata_google_scholar_case_law_getScholarCaseLawOpinion

One court opinion, with the cases it cites.

The id comes from the search tool rather than from a URL. Set asSdt to a case-law court scope, for example 4, and every organic result then carries caseId beside caseHasdataLink.

Returns caseResults with title, name, courtName, cert, and the firstPage and lastPage of the printed opinion. dates holds the argued and decided dates as separate entries, `s