citekick

Agentic tools for academic paper search — a CLI and MCP server that query multiple literature sources in one shot.

Why citekick?

Finding papers usually means juggling separate APIs, rate limits, and response formats for every source. citekick unifies them behind a single interface:

• Multi-source search — Query 8 sources in parallel: Semantic Scholar, arXiv, PubMed, Crossref, Europe PMC, OpenReview, DBLP, and OpenAlex.

• CLI + MCP — Use it directly from your terminal (citekick) or expose it to AI agents as an MCP server (citekick-mcp).

• Agent-friendly output — JSON or Markdown results, ready to be consumed by humans or LLMs.

• Response caching — Built-in HTTP cache to stay polite with APIs and speed up repeated queries.

• Configurable defaults — API keys, preferred sources, year ranges, and output format persisted in one TOML file.

Related MCP server: mcp-openalex

Installation

Install the citekick CLI and MCP server globally using uv:

# Install with uv (recommended)
uv tool install citekick

# Or with pip
pip install citekick

CLI Usage

1. citekick search

Search academic literature across multiple sources.

citekick search "attention is all you need"                    # Search all default sources
citekick search "diffusion models" --sources arxiv,openalex    # Restrict to specific sources
citekick search "protein folding" --year-from 2023 --format markdown
citekick search "llm agents" --max-results 20 --no-cache

Tip: the search subcommand is optional — citekick "query" works too.

2. citekick config

Configure API keys and default search settings in ~/.config/citekick/config.toml.

citekick config                                    # Create an empty config file
citekick config --mailto you@example.com           # Set contact email (polite-pool access)
citekick config --openalex-api-key KEY --sources arxiv,pubmed

Credentials and optional contact email are read from ~/.config/citekick/config.toml. The [api] values are all optional; missing or empty values leave the corresponding source keyless.

Agent Integration

To use citekick as an MCP server, add this to your agent's MCP config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "citekick": {
      "command": "citekick-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Or using uvx (without prior installation):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "citekick": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "citekick", "citekick-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Development

# Install hatch
uv tool install hatch

# Run full release check (linting, static typing with mypy, and test suite with coverage)
hatch run release

License

MIT