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gokmengokhanMCP SERVER

EndNote Library Connector

Search your EndNote library from Claude — by keyword, by PDF content, or by meaning — then format citations in five styles, export BibTeX and read specific pages from an attached paper.

by gokmengokhan ↗Academic Literature & CitationsCommunity

LABSCO SUMMARY

Searching inside the PDFs is what makes it more than a reference list.

Finding the paper where you read a particular method — not the paper whose abstract mentions it — is the query EndNote itself is worst at, and full-text plus semantic search against the attached PDFs answers it. Adding references later is cheap because indexing is incremental; the one-off cost is the embedding pass, roughly three minutes for a four-thousand-reference library.

What it is

A bridge between an EndNote reference library and an MCP client. You export the library as XML once; the server indexes the references and the text of the attached PDFs into a local SQLite database with full-text search, and optionally generates embeddings so search can work by meaning rather than keyword. Everything stays on your machine — the library is never uploaded.

What you get

  • References searched by author, title, year, keywords and abstract, BM25-ranked and returned with DOI links — search_references
  • Search inside the PDFs themselves, for concepts, quotes and methods, or combined with metadata in one call — search_fulltext, search_library
  • Meaning-based search that finds papers using different terminology than your query — search_semantic
  • Full metadata for a reference, and related references found through the embeddings when they exist — get_reference_details, find_related
  • Citations formatted as APA 7th, Harvard, Vancouver, Chicago author-date or IEEE, and a formatted bibliography for several references at once — get_citation, get_bibliography
  • BibTeX export with proper entry types, cite keys and all available fields — get_bibtex
  • Specific pages read out of a PDF attachment, and broad topic listing — read_pdf_section, list_references_by_topic
  • Re-indexing on demand after you add references, incrementally rather than from scratch — rebuild_index

Requirements

EndNote 20 or newer, any edition, and an XML export of your library — File > Export > XML. Python 3.10+ and uv tool install endnote-mcp or pip install endnote-mcp; the published package is endnote-mcp 1.4.8, registered as io.github.gokmengokhan/endnote-mcp, running over stdio. endnote-mcp setup auto-detects the XML export and PDF directory, indexes the library and writes the client configuration for you. Semantic search is optional and needs pip install endnote-mcp[semantic] followed by endnote-mcp embed; it uses the all-MiniLM-L6-v2 model locally, so no API key is involved. Configuration lives in a config.yaml per platform, holding endnote_xml, pdf_dir, db_path and max_pdf_pages, which defaults to 30 pages per read request. Indexing 4,000 references takes about 1 second for metadata and about 3 minutes for embeddings; keyword search runs under 50 ms and semantic search under 200 ms.

Setup effort

One command — uv tool install endnote-mcp

See installation options