BVS MCP Server

A remote Model Context Protocol server that lets any MCP-compatible AI client (Claude Desktop, claude.ai, Cursor, etc.) search the Biblioteca Virtual em Saúde (BVS) — the largest Latin American / Iberoamerican scientific health literature hub — via its public iAHx API.

Exposes Streamable HTTP (the current MCP transport; SSE is deprecated).

Tools

Tool	Parameters	Description
search_bvs	query, database="LILACS", lang="pt", limit=10, search_field="tw", offset=0	General search. database accepts comma-separated list of LILACS, MEDLINE, IBECS, BDENF. search_field: tw (all), ti (title), au (author), mh (MeSH). Supports boolean operators AND/OR/AND NOT, phrase quotes and parentheses.
get_article_details	article_url	Full metadata for an article given its BVS URL or id (biblio-XXXXX).
search_by_author	author_name, database="LILACS", limit=10	Shortcut for author search (index=au).
search_by_subject	subject, database="LILACS", limit=10	Shortcut for controlled-vocabulary search (MeSH/DeCS, index=mh).

All tools return Markdown-formatted text.

Endpoints

• POST /mcp — Streamable HTTP MCP endpoint
• GET /health — liveness probe → {"status":"ok"}

Local development

pip install -r requirements.txt
python server.py
# server on http://localhost:8080
curl http://localhost:8080/health

Example prompts

• "Search BVS for recent LILACS articles about dengue published in Brazil."
• "Use the BVS tool to find articles by author Paulo Buss in LILACS."
• "Find MeSH-indexed articles on hipertensão arterial in both LILACS and MEDLINE."
• "Show me the full metadata for this BVS article: https://pesquisa.bvsalud.org/portal/resource/pt/biblio-XXXXX"

Notes

• No authentication is configured. If exposed publicly, consider a reverse proxy with a token or private networking.
• All upstream calls use a 10 s timeout and a realistic browser User-Agent to get past the Bunny Shield anti-bot challenge on pesquisa.bvsalud.org.
• XML from BVS is occasionally malformed; the client parses with lxml in recovery mode and sanitizes control characters and bare & entities.
• BVS iAHx base: https://pesquisa.bvsalud.org/portal/.