Panda Research Tools

Why it got a B

An MIT community server from one developer (GitHub pandadad0214, "Panda Federation"), on PyPI and in the official MCP Registry since November 2026. It's a thin wrapper: each tool runs one of the author's Actors on Apify, billed to your own Apify account. Eight tools: reference_checker (flags fake, miscited and retracted references through Crossref), citation_formatter, literature_search (OpenAlex), pubmed_evidence_table, researcher_expert_finder, pdf_table_extractor, wayback_snapshot_finder and topic_trends_tracker (Wikipedia page views). Results cost about $0.001 to $0.02 each (OCR on a scanned PDF page is the dearest). Each call is capped at $0.50 by default, but the AI can raise that cap to $25 for a call, and PANDA_MAX_CHARGE_USD only changes the default. Every tool is marked read-only, so a client that skips approval for read-only tools won't ask before a call spends money. The Actors that do the work are closed source, but they run with Apify's limited permissions, so they can't read the rest of your Apify account. No advisories on record. Biggest deduction: the README has you paste your default Apify token, which can use your whole Apify account; create a scoped token that can only run pandadad0214's Actors, with an expiry date, and use that instead.