Scopus Plus MCP

The Scopus MCP server that goes further: search, full text, citation networks, journal quality and bibliometrics, for Claude and other AI assistants.

Search the literature, trace who cites whom across generations, map research fronts and intellectual bases, and pull the counts, metrics and bibliography you need, from a conversation. It is an MCP server, so any MCP client can use it: Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor.

• 🕸️ Citation networks. Bibliographic coupling, co-citation, multi-generation citation lineages, and the citation network within any set of papers, with main path and key routes, exported for Pajek, VOSviewer or Gephi.
• 🧾 Audited, not just built. Citer sets verified across search strategies, reference lists checked against Crossref for gaps, and the sentences behind each citation, with their intent, from Semantic Scholar.
• 🔀 Two data sources. Scopus by default; add source="openalex" to run the same analyses without a Scopus subscription.
• 📊 Bibliometrics. Where a topic is published and in which quartile per field; journals above a percentile cut-off in chosen categories; publications per year; journal metrics; BibTeX for any list of papers.
• 🔎 Full-text search. Find Elsevier papers that use a term in their body, and see how often and where each one uses it.
• 🩺 Honest about access. One call tells you which tools your current Scopus access supports, and why the rest fail.
• ✅ Tested. 443 test functions, CI on Linux, macOS and Windows, and a live check of every tool against the real APIs.

How it compares with the other Scopus MCP servers: comparison.

Ask things like

Map the research front around these six papers on organizing visions.

Trace two generations of work citing Swanson & Ramiller (1997) and show me the main path.

Build the citation network of every Basket of Eight paper citing the organizing-vision papers, and show how the main path cites its predecessors.

How has publishing on "digital transformation" grown since 2010?

Get SJR and CiteScore for the Basket of Eight, and BibTeX for the papers we just found.

Tools

Parameters and details for each: tool reference.

Install

You need an API key from the Elsevier Developer Portal (register with your institutional email). OpenAlex needs no key.

Claude Desktop — one click:

1. Download scopus-plus-mcp-<version>.mcpb from the latest release.
2. Open it (or drag it into Settings → Extensions), click Install, and paste your API key when asked. Claude stores it securely.

Claude Code — two commands:

claude plugin marketplace add michalhron/scopus-plus-mcp
claude plugin install scopus-plus-mcp@michalhron

Then make your key available, either in your shell (export SCOPUS_API_KEY=...) or, better, in the OS secret store.

Any other MCP client (needs uv):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "scopus-plus": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["scopus-plus-mcp"],
      "env": { "SCOPUS_API_KEY": "YOUR_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

Then ask your assistant to run diagnose_connection: it checks your key and tells you which tools your Scopus access supports.

Documentation

Origins

Formerly citation-network-mcp (and before that michalhron/scopus-mcp). This project began as a fork of qwe4559999/scopus-mcp by thinktraveller and qwe4559999, which provides Scopus search, abstracts, author profiles and citing papers. Everything since version 0.2 was developed here by Michal Hron. MIT licensed; see LICENSE.

Scopus and ScienceDirect are trademarks of Elsevier B.V. This project is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by Elsevier; it uses their public APIs with your own key and subscription.