aletheia-mcp

# aletheia-mcp An MCP server that gives AI agents structured access to scientific literature — 250M+ papers indexed via OpenAlex, covering arXiv, PubMed, Crossref, and more — so they can do research, not just search. ## The gap this fills Tools like Elicit, Consensus, and SciSpace are great but they're standalone chat apps. You ask one question, you get one answer. You can't chain operations. With aletheia-mcp running in Claude or any MCP-compatible client, you can ask things like: > "I'm reviewing literature on mitochondrial dysfunction in Parkinson's. Find the 20 most-cited papers from the last 5 years, pull the full text of the three most influential, identify the exact mechanisms they propose, and flag any that contradict each other." Under the hood, Claude chains multiple tool calls — search, fetch metadata, walk citations, download and parse full PDFs — and synthesizes. That's the difference between search and research. ## Tools in v0.3.0 - `search_papers(query, limit)` — unified search across the OpenAlex corpus - `get_paper_details(paper_id)` — full metadata for any paper by OpenAlex ID, DOI, PubMed ID, or URL - `get_citation_graph(paper_id, direction, limit)` — walk citations forward (`direction="citations"`) or references backward (`direction="references"`) - `get_paper_full_text(paper_id)` — **new in v0.3** — fetches and extracts the full text of any open-access paper. Handles arXiv, PubMed Central, and direct publisher PDFs. Falls back gracefully when no OA version is available. All paper-returning tools use a normalized shape: `{id, title, abstract, authors, year, citation_count, venue, doi, url, pdf_url, source}`. The full-text tool adds `text` and `char_count`. ## Why OpenAlex (not Semantic Scholar) Earlier iterations used Semantic Scholar. The free API key there is gated and institution-preferred — independent developers face slow or rejected applications, which meant future users of this tool would hit the same wall. [OpenAlex](https://…