Mendeley MCP Server
An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server that connects your Mendeley reference library to LLM applications like Claude Desktop, Cursor, and other MCP-compatible clients.
Features
- Search your library - Find papers by title, author, abstract, or notes
- Manage folders - Browse, create, rename, delete, and nest collections
- Get full metadata - Retrieve complete document details including abstracts
- Search global catalog - Access Mendeley's 100M+ paper database
- DOI lookup - Find papers by their DOI
- Manage documents - Add, update, delete, and organize entries across folders
- Read your annotations - Surface the highlights and notes you made on PDFs
- Export BibTeX - Generate citation entries for a document or a whole folder
- Download attached files - Retrieve document files when Mendeley exposes them
Prerequisites
- Mendeley Account - Sign up at mendeley.com (uses Elsevier authentication)
- Mendeley API App - Register at dev.mendeley.com/myapps.html
- Sign in with your Elsevier credentials
- Click "Register a new app"
- Set redirect URL to
http://localhost:8585/callback - Select "Authorization code" flow (not Legacy)
- Note your Client ID and Client Secret
