pubmedmcp

MCP.Pizza Chef: grll

One tool does the whole job. You describe what you are after — a topic, a date range, a journal, a phrase from a title — and it hands back matching titles, abstracts, authors, journals, publication dates and reference numbers straight from the US National Library of Medicine. It only reads, never posts, and needs no account or key. Setup is a short snippet in Claude Desktop, though the uv tool has to be installed first. Expect abstracts rather than full papers.

Web/Research

Writing

Use This MCP server To

Find recent studies on a condition I am researching Pull abstracts published inside a specific date range Get the reference number and DOI for a paper See what recent research says about a particular treatment Track down a half-remembered paper by a phrase in its title

README

PubMed MCP

A MCP server that allows to search and fetch articles from PubMed.

PubMed is a database of over 35 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books.

This MCP server relies on the pubmedclient Python package to perform the search and fetch operations.

Usage

Add the following to your claude_desktop_config.json file:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "pubmedmcp": {
            "command": "uvx",
            "args": ["pubmedmcp@latest"],
            "env": {
                "UV_PRERELEASE": "allow",
                "UV_PYTHON": "3.12"
            }
        }
    }
}

Make sure uv is installed on your system and 'uvx' is available in your PATH (claude PATH sometimes is not the same as your system PATH). You can add a PATH key in your claude_desktop_config.json file to make sure uv is available in claude PATH.

pubmedmcp FAQ

Do I need an account or a key?

No. There is nothing to sign up for and no key anywhere in the code. The trade-off is that it queries the National Library of Medicine anonymously, which caps anonymous visitors at roughly three requests a second, so a long run of searches can slow down or start failing.

Does it give me the full papers?

No, and this matters. You get the title, abstract, authors, journal, publication date, DOI and reference number. For the full text you follow the DOI to the publisher, where a paywall may be waiting.

How many results does one search return?

Twenty by default. You can ask for more and the underlying database allows a great deal more, but everything comes back as one long block of plain text, so large requests get unwieldy fast.

Which apps does it work in?

It was written for Claude Desktop and the instructions show that configuration, but any assistant that can start a local command from a settings snippet will run it.

Can it change or post anything?

No. There is exactly one tool and it searches. Nothing is written back to PubMed and nothing on your computer is touched.

How hard is the setup?

Easy once one prerequisite is out of the way. You paste a few lines into your assistant's settings, but the uv tool must already be installed, and assistants sometimes cannot find it unless you also tell them where to look.

Can I use this to check whether a health claim has research behind it?

Yes, with a caveat. Describe the claim and you get back abstracts you can read and cite. What comes back is whatever the database matched, not a verdict, and none of it is medical advice.

Is it still being updated?

It has been quiet since September 2025. It is a thin, single-purpose wrapper over a long-established public database, so it will most likely keep working, but do not expect new features.