Search & Discovery MCP Servers

OpenAlex is an open catalog of the global research system. Search works, retrieve work metadata, and expand citations using an open citation graph. A free API key from openalex.org/settings/api unlocks $1/day of usage; unauthenticated calls are limited to a small demo allowance.

Directory of Open Access Journals — a curated index of peer-reviewed, open access journals. Search across articles and journals by topic, author, or keyword.

Cat Facts API providing random interesting facts about cats for entertainment and education.

Google Programmable Search Engine (Custom Search JSON API) lets you run web and image searches via API using an API key and a search engine (cx) identifier.

Random User Generator API providing realistic fake user profiles with names, addresses, emails, and photos for testing and development.

Crossref provides DOI registration and rich scholarly metadata. Use the Crossref REST API to search works and fetch metadata by DOI.

JSONPlaceholder providing fake REST API data for testing and prototyping including posts, users, todos, and comments.

Zenodo open research repository hosted by CERN. Search and retrieve research outputs including papers, datasets, and software with DOI-backed metadata, versioning, and file access.

Search MCPBundles documentation and blog posts. Returns ranked markdown sections from the official docs site so agents can answer setup, bundle, and integration questions with current guidance.

Joke API providing programming jokes and humor for developers and entertainment.

DataCite DOI registration and scholarly metadata API. Search for research works by keyword, fetch detailed metadata by DOI, and explore citation and relationship graphs.

Search and retrieve scientific papers from arXiv. Provides paper metadata (title, authors, abstract, categories) and PDF links via the official arXiv API.

Search DBLP's computer science bibliography, fetch publication records and BibTeX, look up authors and venues, and estimate publication trends from live DBLP results.

Open Brewery DB API providing detailed information about breweries worldwide, including location, type, and contact details.

REST Countries API providing detailed country data including geography, demographics, currencies, languages, and more.

NCBI E-utilities API providing access to PubMed and other biomedical databases with search and retrieval capabilities.

PubMed Central API providing access to millions of biomedical and life sciences research articles, with full-text search and metadata retrieval.

World Bank API providing access to global economic indicators, development data, and country statistics for research and analysis.

Research Organization Registry (ROR) — a global, open registry of research organizations. Search and retrieve organization metadata by name or identifier.

Europe PMC indexes life sciences literature including PubMed, patents, and clinical guidelines. Search publications, retrieve citations, and explore reference networks.

Harmonic is a startup discovery and enrichment platform with 29M+ companies and 190M+ people. Search, enrich, and manage deal flow with company data, founder profiles, funding history, investor networks, saved searches, and company/people lists.

Semantic Scholar Academic Graph, Recommendations, and Datasets APIs — search papers, explore citations, discover authors, get paper recommendations, and search text snippets across 214M+ academic papers. Most endpoints work without authentication; an optional API key provides dedicated rate limits (sent as x-api-key header, case-sensitive per the OpenAPI spec).

Internet Archive access for historical web snapshots (Wayback Machine), catalog metadata search across books/audio/video/software, OCR full-text search inside digitized texts, and item metadata lookup.

Crunchbase is the leading platform for company intelligence. Search and look up organizations, people, funding rounds, acquisitions, and investors. Requires an Enterprise or Applications license for full API access.