arXiv MCP Server

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that enables interacting with the arXiv API using natural language.

Features

• Retrieve metadata about scholarly articles hosted on arXiv.org

• Download articles in PDF format to the local machine

• Search arXiv database for a particular query

• Retrieve articles and load them into a large language model (LLM) context

Related MCP server: arXiv MCP Server

Tools

• get_article_url

  • Retrieve the direct PDF URL by title or arXiv ID

    • title (String, optional)

    • arxiv_id (String, optional)

• download_article

  • Download the article as a PDF

    • title (String, optional)

    • arxiv_id (String, optional)

• load_article_to_context

  • Load article text into context (partial extraction supported)

    • title (String, optional)

    • arxiv_id (String, optional)

    • start_page (Int, optional, 1-based)

    • end_page (Int, optional, 1-based)

    • max_pages (Int, optional)

    • max_chars (Int, optional)

    • preview (Bool, optional; HEAD check only)

• get_details

  • Retrieve metadata by title or arXiv ID

    • title (String, optional)

    • arxiv_id (String, optional)

• search_arxiv

  • Search arXiv and return matching article metadata

    • all_fields (String): General keyword search across all metadata fields

    • title (String): Keyword(s) to search for within the titles of articles

    • author (String): Author name(s) to filter results by

    • abstract (String): Keyword(s) to search for within article abstracts

    • start (Int): Index of the first result to return

    • max_results (Int, default 10, up to 50)

Setup

MacOS

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/prashalruchiranga/arxiv-mcp-server.git
cd arxiv-mcp-server

Install uv package manager. For more details on installing, visit the official uv documentation.

# Using Homebrew
brew install uv

# or
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Create and activate virtual environment.

uv venv --python=python3.13
source .venv/bin/activate

Install development dependencies.

uv sync

Windows

Install uv package manager. For more details on installing, visit the official uv documentation.

# Use irm to download the script and execute it with iex
powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"

Close and reopen the shell, then clone the repository.

git clone https://github.com/prashalruchiranga/arxiv-mcp-server.git
cd arxiv-mcp-server

Create and activate virtual environment.

uv venv --python=python3.13
source .venv\Scripts\activate

Install development dependencies.

uv sync

Usage with Claude Desktop

To enable this integration, add the server configuration to your claude_desktop_config.json file. Make sure to create the file if it doesn’t exist.

On MacOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json On Windows: %APPDATA%/Roaming/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "arxiv-server": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": [
        "--directory",
        "/ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/PARENT/FOLDER/arxiv-mcp-server/src/arxiv_server",
        "run",
        "server.py"
      ],
      "env": {
        "DOWNLOAD_PATH": "/ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/DOWNLOADS/FOLDER"
      }
    }
  }
}

You may need to put the full path to the uv executable in the command field. You can get this by running which uv on MacOS or where uv on Windows.

Deployment

• Hosted platforms such as Smithery require HTTP transport. Set MCP_TRANSPORT=http; the server will bind to the PORT environment variable provided by the platform. The provided Docker/Smithery config also pins the SSE endpoints to /.well-known/mcp/sse and /.well-known/mcp/messages/ for spec compliance.

• Hosted deployments expose Streamable HTTP at /mcp and serve a JSON schema at /.well-known/mcp-config so Smithery can provision per-session settings (currently just an optional downloadPath).

• For local stdio integrations, no additional configuration is required—the server defaults to STDIO when PORT is not set.

Example Prompts

Can you get the details of 'Reasoning to Learn from Latent Thoughts' paper?

Get the papers authored or co-authored by Yann Lecun on convolutional neural networks

Download the attention is all you need paper

Can you get the papers by Andrew NG which have 'convolutional neural networks' in title?

Can you display the paper?

List the titles of papers by Yann LeCun. Paginate through the API until there are 30 titles

License

Licensed under MIT. See the LICENSE.