IACR MCP Server

Instructions

Implementation Reference

• src/index.ts:129-209 (handler)

  The main handler function that implements the search_papers tool: validates args, fetches IACR ePrint RSS feed, parses XML, filters papers by query, optional year/category/max_results, returns JSON list of matching papers.

  private async searchPapers(args: unknown) {
    const validatedArgs = SearchPapersSchema.parse(args);
    
    try {
      // Fetch RSS feed with comprehensive headers
      const response = await axios.get(IACR_RSS_URL, {
        headers: {
          'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36',
          'Accept': 'application/xml,text/xml,*/*;q=0.8',
          'Accept-Language': 'en-US,en;q=0.9'
        },
        timeout: 15000
      });
  
      // Parse XML feed
      const parsedFeed = await parseStringPromise(response.data);
      
      // Ensure items exist
      if (!parsedFeed.rss?.channel?.[0]?.item) {
        console.error('No items found in RSS feed');
        return { content: [{ type: 'text', text: '[]' }] };
      }
  
      // Current year for filtering
      const currentYear = new Date().getFullYear();
  
      // Extract and filter papers
      const papers = parsedFeed.rss.channel[0].item
        .map((item: any) => ({
          id: item.link[0].split('/').pop(),
          title: item.title[0],
          authors: item['dc:creator'] ? item['dc:creator'][0] : 'Unknown',
          link: item.link[0],
          description: item.description[0],
          pubDate: item.pubDate[0]
        }))
        .filter((paper: IACRPaper) => {
          const title = paper.title.toLowerCase();
          const description = paper.description.toLowerCase();
          const query = validatedArgs.query.toLowerCase();
          
          // Query matching
          const matchesQuery = title.includes(query) || description.includes(query);
          
          // Year filtering
          const paperYear = new Date(paper.pubDate).getFullYear();
          const matchesYear = !validatedArgs.year || 
            (validatedArgs.year && paperYear === validatedArgs.year) ||
            (paperYear >= currentYear - 10);
          
          return matchesQuery && matchesYear;
        })
        .slice(0, validatedArgs.max_results)
        .map((paper: IACRPaper) => ({
          id: paper.id,
          title: paper.title,
          authors: paper.authors,
          year: new Date(paper.pubDate).getFullYear(),
          link: paper.link,
          abstract: paper.description
        }));
  
      // Log results for debugging
      console.error('Search Results:', JSON.stringify(papers, null, 2));
  
      return {
        content: [{
          type: 'text',
          text: JSON.stringify(papers, null, 2)
        }]
      };
    } catch (error) {
      // Comprehensive error logging
      console.error('Search Error:', error);
  
      throw new McpError(
        ErrorCode.InternalError,
        `Search failed: ${error instanceof Error ? error.message : 'Unknown error'}`
      );
    }
  }

• src/index.ts:19-24 (schema)

  Zod schema defining the input parameters for search_papers: query (required string), optional year (number), category (string), max_results (number, default 20).

  const SearchPapersSchema = z.object({
    query: z.string(),
    year: z.number().optional(),
    category: z.string().optional(),
    max_results: z.number().optional().default(20)
  });

• src/index.ts:67-80 (registration)

  Tool registration in the listTools handler: defines name, description, and inputSchema for search_papers.

  {
    name: 'search_papers',
    description: 'Search for papers in the IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive',
    inputSchema: {
      type: 'object',
      properties: {
        query: { type: 'string' },
        year: { type: 'number' },
        category: { type: 'string' },
        max_results: { type: 'number', default: 20 }
      },
      required: ['query']
    }
  },