Paper MCP Server

paper-mcp

Remotely-callable MCP server for academic paper search & full-text retrieval, served at https://latex-tools.online/mcp.

Three corpora behind one normalized interface:

• arxiv (default) — search, metadata, and full-text (HTML / markdown / LaTeX source)
• semanticscholar (alias s2) — the full S2 API surface: citation graph, authors, recommendations, full-text snippets, bulk datasets
• openalex (alias oa) — 316M all-field works: citation graph, authors with h-index, institutions, topics, influence metrics

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Tools (25)

Generic / source-agnostic (7)

read_paper fetch chain: arxiv.org/html/{id} → ar5iv fallback (markdown/html), or arxiv.org/e-print/{id} tarball main .tex (latex). Formulas are recovered from the LaTeXML alttext invariant.

Semantic Scholar (18)

• Graph: get_paper_citations · get_paper_references · get_paper_authors
• Lookup: match_paper_title · autocomplete_papers
• Bulk: search_papers_bulk (≤1000, sortable, token paging) · get_papers_batch
• Authors: search_authors · get_author · get_author_papers · get_authors_batch
• Full-text: search_snippets (search inside paper body)
• Recommend: recommend_papers_for_paper · recommend_papers_from_examples
• Datasets: list_dataset_releases · get_dataset_release · get_dataset_download_links · get_dataset_diffs

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Layout

paper_mcp/
  server.py            FastMCP server (tool registrations + instructions)
  models.py            normalized Paper model
  sources/
    base.py            source registry (get_source / list_sources)
    arxiv.py           arXiv Atom API + read_paper (HTML/markdown/latex)
    semanticscholar.py Semantic Scholar full API surface
pyproject.toml

Run locally

cd paper-mcp
python -m venv .venv && . .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .
PAPER_MCP_PORT=9400 python -m paper_mcp.server
# MCP endpoint at http://127.0.0.1:9400/mcp (JSON-RPC; a plain GET returns 406)

Env

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Deployment (latex-tools.online)

• Runs as paper-mcp.service on the latex-tools server, WorkingDirectory /opt/paper-mcp, port 9400.
• nginx reverse-proxies https://latex-tools.online/mcp → 127.0.0.1:9400/mcp.
• Secrets in /etc/paper-mcp.env (SEMANTIC_SCHOLAR_API_KEY).
• systemd unit + env are backed up under ../deploy/ in this repo.

Update flow

This repo is the source of truth. The server runs an independent copy under /opt/paper-mcp (not auto-synced):

# edit here → push → deploy
scp -r paper_mcp/* latex-tools:/opt/paper-mcp/paper_mcp/
ssh latex-tools 'systemctl restart paper-mcp'
ssh latex-tools 'curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" http://127.0.0.1:9400/mcp'  # 406 = healthy (needs JSON-RPC handshake)

Notes

• arXiv calls are politely rate-limited + retried (_USER_AGENT, backoff).
• read_paper covers ~80%+ of papers via official HTML; older scan-only papers may have no full text.
• Moved here from the docs repo on 2026-06-07; that copy is gone.