A literature search that reads the papers, not just the titles.
Literature reviews, method comparisons and reference checks run straight against PubMed and PubMed Central, with full text where PMC holds it and the abstract plus a link where it does not.
What it is
A connector Anthropic built and runs at pubmed.mcp.claude.com, which reads PubMed and PubMed Central (PMC), the U.S. National Library of Medicine's biomedical literature databases. It needs no sign-in and no key, and Anthropic says it is free for all Claude users.
What you get
- Articles searched by keyword, author, journal or advanced query syntax
- An article's abstract, authors, publication date and a link to the full paper
- Full text for articles held in PubMed Central
- Related articles across NCBI databases
- A citation from a bibliography matched to its PubMed entry
- IDs converted between PMID, PMCID and DOI
- An article's copyright status
Requirements
An MCP client that can reach a remote address. In Claude you add it under Settings > Connectors. In Claude Code you can install it as a plugin from Anthropic's life-sciences marketplace, and developers can attach it to Claude's Messages API with an Anthropic API key. If it reports a rate limit, wait a moment and ask again.
Setup effort
Paste a URL — add the endpoint to your client