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LibKey MCP - General Information

LibKey MCP - General Information

The LibKey MCP (Model Context Protocol) is designed to be available to all LibKey organizational customers for use in AI systems. It is effectively an MCP wrapped version of the LibKey API, providing two tools for use - the get_doi and get_pmid tools which map perfectly to the DOI and PMID API end points of the LibKey API. The responses the AI service uses is identical to each of these.

However, unlike the API, the MCP includes detailed instructions in the tool_descriptions to help the AI service know how to interpret responses, how to formal them for best presentation, what to do if an items isn’t found, encouragement to try to find identifiers whenever possible and so on. It even provides a condition for suggesting that a DOI is hallucinated!

In general it will be using the LibKey API to providing linking and editorial status information (retraction, expression of concern, problematic journal, etc.) information in real-time while using the AI service. Here is an example of an enhanced citation from Claude:

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The LibKey MCP at present is designed for enterprise use only. The MCP server URL is provided with an embedded key for proper usage tracking and thus is not suitable for individual research use at this time.

Getting Started

  1. Request an MCP URL from Third Iron Support via a support ticket.

  2. In your tool of choice, add the MCP server with the URL provided by Third Iron support and make it available to your users. You can bake it into a GPT or make it part of an agentic workflow that you make available to your users.

  3. Usage of the tool will be captured by Third Iron and later in 2026 reported as an individual line item on usage reports.

Questions or Feedback? Contact us!