mcp-citations

6 academic citation tools for Claude. DOI → BibTeX / APA / MLA / Chicago / Harvard. Free, MIT.

Existing citation MCPs are arxiv-only. mcp-citations covers all of CrossRef (~120M+ DOIs across every academic publisher) and outputs in 5 standard citation styles.

Install

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "citations": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@dpm-tools/mcp-citations"]
    }
  }
}

Requires Node.js 22.18+.

Tools (6)

• get_metadata — Look up DOI metadata (title, authors, journal, year, etc.) via CrossRef.
• format_citation — Format any DOI in BibTeX / APA / MLA / Chicago / Harvard.
• search_works — Search CrossRef by query + optional year range.
• bibtex_from_dois — Build a bibliography from an array of DOIs (max 20).
• extract_dois_from_text — Regex-extract all DOIs from a block of text.
• get_citation_count — Number of times a DOI has been cited (OpenCitations + CrossRef fallback).

Example prompts

• "Look up DOI 10.1038/nature12373 and tell me about it."
• "Format 10.1038/nature12373 as APA."
• "Find papers about 'large language models' published 2023-2024."
• "Build a BibTeX bibliography from these 10 DOIs..."
• "How many times has 10.1145/3442381.3449989 been cited?"

See examples/prompts.md for more.

Why this exists

Researchers need fast citation formatting. Existing MCPs in this space:

• blazickjp/arxiv-mcp-server — arxiv-only (~2M papers, no humanities, no medicine, no engineering journals)
• No general "format any DOI" wrapper

mcp-citations covers all of CrossRef — ~120M+ DOIs spanning every major academic publisher. All 5 standard citation styles correctly formatted (handles single/multi-author rules, en-dash for Chicago page ranges, \textit{} for BibTeX journal italics, et al. rules per style).

API sources (all free)

• CrossRef (api.crossref.org) — DOI metadata, search. Polite-pool User-Agent identification used.
• OpenCitations (opencitations.net) — citation counts (CrossRef fallback)

No API keys required.

Sister servers from dpm

• @dpm-tools/mcp-devkit — UUID, hash, JWT, JSON, cron
• @dpm-tools/mcp-public-data — sun, moon, holidays, geocoding
• @dpm-tools/mcp-diff — diff, patch, 3-way merge
• @dpm-tools/mcp-archive — Wayback Machine + Internet Archive

License

MIT © dpm (digital product mill)