Alterlab bgpt search

Skill AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills/skills/research-tools/alterlab-bgpt-search

239 evaluated academic Claude/agent skills across 17 research domains (bioinformatics, data science, clinical, social-science methods, Turkish academia & more). Executable eval per skill, deterministic citation verifier, research→write→review→publish pipeline, and a skill-finder front door. Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI & Copilot.

Install

npx -y skills add AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills --skill alterlab-bgpt-search

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What its author says it does

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Search scientific papers and retrieve structured experimental data extracted from full-text studies via the BGPT MCP server, returning 25+ fields per paper (methods, results, sample sizes, quality scores, conclusions). Use when running a literature review or evidence synthesis, or when needing experimental details (sample sizes, effect sizes, methods, quality scores) that abstracts alone do not provide. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

The file declares its own license as MIT. That is the author’s claim about this one file, and it is not the same thing as the license GitHub reports for the repository, which is listed with the other numbers below.

SKILL.md

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BGPT Paper Search

Overview

BGPT is a remote MCP server that searches a curated database of scientific papers built from raw experimental data extracted from full-text studies. Unlike traditional literature databases that return titles and abstracts, BGPT returns structured data from the actual paper content — methods, quantitative results, sample sizes, quality assessments, and 25+ metadata fields per paper.

When to Use This Skill

Use BGPT when the value is in structured full-text experimental data, not titles/abstracts:

Building evidence tables for a meta-analysis, scoping review, or clinical guideline
Extracting sample sizes, effect sizes, methods, protocols, or conclusions across studies
Comparing methodologies, or filtering papers by quality score / evidence grading

For broad title/abstract discovery use alterlab-pubmed; for real-time web-grounded summaries of recent developments use alterlab-perplexity.

Setup

BGPT is a remote MCP server — no local installation required.

Claude Desktop / Claude Code

Add to your MCP configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "bgpt": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["mcp-remote", "https://bgpt.pro/mcp/sse"]
    }
  }
}

npm (alternative)

npx bgpt-mcp

Usage

Once configured, use the search_papers tool provided by the BGPT MCP server:

Search for papers about: "CRISPR gene editing efficiency in human cells"

The server returns structured results including:

Title, authors, journal, year, DOI
Methods: Experimental techniques, models, protocols
Results: Key findings with quantitative data
Sample sizes: Number of subjects/samples
Quality scores: Study quality assessments
Conclusions: Author conclusions and implications

Pricing

Free tier: 50 free results, no API key required
Paid: $0.02 per result (billed per result actually returned, not per search) with an API key from bgpt.pro/mcp

Complementary Skills

Pairs well with:

alterlab-literature-review — gather structured data with BGPT, then synthesize
alterlab-pubmed — PubMed for broad discovery, BGPT for deep experimental data
alterlab-biorxiv — combine preprint discovery with full-text data extraction
alterlab-pyzotero — manage citations from BGPT search results