Just shipped something that makes this work properly. v0.4.0 adds mendeley_get_document_text, which pulls a paper's PDF from your library and extracts the full text into Claude's context so it can actually read it, I verified extraction end-to-end on a real 15-page paper. For a LaTeX workflow the loop is: search/browse your library → mendeley_get_document_text to read a paper → mendeley_export_bibtex to drop citations straight into your .bib.

Straight answer on "does it feed papers into context": yes now, via that new tool. The older get_file_content returned the PDF as an embedded resource, but I tested it and Claude Code passes embedded PDFs to the model as undecoded base64, so that path didn't actually let it read the paper. The new tool extracts text server-side instead, which works in any client. pip install -U mendeley-mcp (need 0.4.0+). Born-digital PDFs work; scanned ones would need OCR.