Research MCP

Read-only MCP server for academic research. Lets an LLM agent search papers, inspect metadata, follow citation graphs, generate BibTeX, and read full texts of open-access PDFs — all via FastMCP tools.

Requirements

• Python 3.13+

• uv

• Internet access to the public APIs (no API key required)

How it works

Semantic Scholar is rate-limited when used without a key, so every request retries with exponential backoff (honoring Retry-After) before falling back to OpenAlex. Results always tell the agent which source was used. The arXiv API enforces a ~3 s spacing rule, which the server honors; DBLP resets connections on rapid sequential requests, so venue-stream pages are fetched with a 3 s politeness delay too.

Caching

All brittle API responses, search results, venue proceedings corpora, and PDFs are cached on disk under ~/.cache/research-mcp/ (api/ for JSON responses, pdf/ for downloaded PDFs):

• Fresh cache hits are served instantly — repeat queries don't touch the network.

• Venue corpora (assembled from DBLP pages) are cached as a whole, so re-surveys of a conference program are instant even if DBLP drops a page.

• Stale fallback: if an API is down or rate-limiting, the last cached response is served anyway, so the agent still gets an answer.

• Cache TTLs: 7 days for arXiv and BibTeX (stable data), 24 h for search/metadata and DBLP. Override the location with RESEARCH_MCP_CACHE_DIR.

Configuration

Register the server in your coding agent's MCP configuration. For example, in Opencode's opencode.json:

{
  "mcp": {
    "research-mcp": {
      "command": [
        "uvx",
        "--from",
        "git+https://github.com/404Simon/research-mcp",
        "research-mcp"
      ],
      "enabled": true,
      "type": "local"
    }
  }
}

Environment variables (all optional)

Tools

search_papers

Search academic papers by keyword with optional venue and year filters. Returns structured results with title, year, venue, authors, DOI, abstract, citation count, and an open-access PDF link when available.

source="arxiv" searches the arXiv preprint API and is the recommended way to find specific recent papers by exact name, e.g. query='ti:"carbon intensity" AND abs:forecast' (arXiv field syntax is passed through verbatim). All results are cached, so repeat searches are instant.

venue_proceedings

Survey a venue's proceedings (what actually gets published there). Use this to check whether a paper idea fits a conference like ACM e-Energy.

The full venue corpus is fetched from DBLP (paginated past its 100-hit cap), ranked client-side, and cached as a whole — re-surveys are instant.

{"results": [
  {"title": "Reinforcement Learning Approach for Optimal Distributed Energy Management in a Microgrid",
   "year": 2018, "venue": "IEEE Transactions on Power Systems",
   "authors": ["Elham Foruzan", "Leen-Kiat Soh", "S. Asgarpoor"],
   "doi": "10.1109/tpwrs.2018.2823641",
   "abstract": "In this paper, a multiagent-based model is used ...",
   "citation_count": 297, "open_access_pdf": null,
   "source": "openalex"}],
 "note": "(Semantic Scholar unavailable — used OpenAlex instead: RequestFailed)",
 "count": 1}

paper_details

Full metadata for a paper. Accepts a DOI (e.g. 10.1109/tpwrs.2018.2823641), an arXiv ID (e.g. 2408.03506, arXiv:2408.03506, or an arxiv.org/abs/... URL), or an OpenAlex ID.

Returns title, authors, venue, year, abstract, TLDR, citation count, DOI, and open-access PDF:

get_citation_graph

Follow a paper's citations forward or backward for snowball searching.

get_bibtex

Generate a BibTeX entry for a DOI. Uses Crossref's native transform; falls back to local generation from OpenAlex metadata (handles arXiv DOIs that Crossref doesn't know).

@article{Foruzan_2018, title={Reinforcement Learning Approach for Optimal Distributed Energy Management in a Microgrid}, volume={33}, ..., author={Foruzan, Elham and Soh, Leen-Kiat and Asgarpoor, Sohrab}, year={2018} }

read_paper_full_text

Download an open-access PDF and extract its text with PyMuPDF. Pass a DOI, an arXiv ID (e.g. 2408.03506), or a direct PDF URL. PDFs are cached locally (~/.cache/research-mcp/pdf/).

Returns the extracted text, page count, source URL, and cached path. If no open-access copy is found, the agent gets a clear message telling it to search for an OA copy or pass a PDF URL directly.

File structure

src/
  main.py              # FastMCP server, tool definitions, fallback orchestration
  client.py            # HTTP client with retry/backoff (429/5xx, Retry-After)
  cache.py             # Disk cache (~/.cache/research-mcp/) with stale fallback
  semanticscholar.py   # Semantic Scholar: search, details, citations (optional API key)
  openalex.py          # OpenAlex: search, details, citation graph, OA-PDF resolution
  arxiv.py             # arXiv API: search, ID lookups (3 s politeness, 7-day cache)
  dblp.py              # DBLP: venue proceedings + venue-scoped search (paged corpus cache)
  crossref.py          # Crossref: BibTeX transform + local fallback generator
  pdf.py               # PDF download/validation/caching + PyMuPDF text extraction

No API key required. Run uv sync && uv run research-mcp to start the server over stdio.