Summary

The check it is built around is narrow and specific: an identifier that resolves cleanly, attached to a title that is not the paper sitting at it.

That pairing is the failure mode a plain existence check cannot catch, and the tools attribute the pattern to Topaz et al. in the Lancet, 2026. Around it sits ordinary bibliographic plumbing, so a reference can go from suspect to verified to formatted to exported without leaving the session. Two boundaries to plan around: the bibliography audit is capped at 25 entries per call, and checkRetraction and checkOpenAccess take one identifier each, so a large list means looping.

What it is

A citation-integrity server for scholarly references: verification of a claimed citation against the record its identifier actually resolves to, retraction and open-access checks, identifier resolution to structured metadata, and formatted or file-format export. Seven tools, over eight identifier types.

What you get

Fabrication detection on one reference: an identifier plus the title, author, container and year being claimed for it, returning one of four verdicts — matched, mismatch, ambiguous or not_found — with per-field similarity scores and the resolved record, so you can see exactly where the claim and the paper diverge (verifyCitation).
The same check across a reference list, taking raw BibTeX, RIS or CSL JSON, running a retraction lookup alongside it, and returning a per-entry verdict table with a corpus summary — capped at 25 entries per call (auditBibliography).
Standing before you cite: whether a work has been retracted, corrected, or had an expression of concern raised, from Crossref's updated-by data (checkRetraction).
Access before you rely on it: whether a work is openly readable, under what licence and at which legal landing page or PDF, sourced from Unpaywall (checkOpenAccess).
Identifiers turned into data across DOIs, PMIDs, PMCIDs, ISBNs, arXiv IDs, ISSNs, NASA ADS bibcodes and WHO IRIS URLs, returning CSL JSON — which also makes it the fastest way to convert a PMID to a PMCID or an arXiv ID to a DOI (resolveIdentifier).
A paste-ready citation in Vancouver, AMA, APA, IEEE, CSE or any of 10,000+ CSL styles, as text, HTML or JSON, followed by a provenance block naming the engine and style that produced it (formatCitation).
A bibliography file in any of nine formats — BibTeX, RIS, CSL JSON, EndNote XML or Refer, RefWorks, MEDLINE, Zotero RDF, CSV or plain text — with the format required rather than guessed (exportCitation).

Requirements

No account and no key to start: it works anonymously against the public Scholar Sidekick API on a rate-limited free tier. A free first-party ssk_ key raises those limits, and a RapidAPI key covers the paid tiers. Run it locally with `npx scholar-sidekick-mcp` over stdio, or point an HTTP-capable client at the hosted endpoint https://scholar-sidekick.com/api/mcp for the same seven tools with nothing installed. The optional LLM screen inside verifyCitation is paid-plan and first-party-authentication only.

Setup effort

One command — npx -y scholar-sidekick-mcp@latest

Scholar Sidekick MCP