Arxiv MCP Server

🚀 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 the arXiv database for a particular query.
• Retrieve articles and load them into a large language model (LLM) context.

🛠️ Tools

get_article_url

• Retrieve the URL of an article hosted on arXiv.org based on its title.
  • title (String): Article title

download_article

• Download the article hosted on arXiv.org as a PDF file.
  • title (String): Article title

load_article_to_context

• Load the article hosted on arXiv.org into the context of an LLM.
  • title (String): Article title

get_details

• Retrieve metadata of an article hosted on arXiv.org based on its title.
  • title (String): Article title

search_arxiv

• Performs a search query on the arXiv API based on specified parameters and returns 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.

📦 Installation

Manual Installation

1. Clone the repository:

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

2. Install the uv package manager. For more details on installing on other operating systems, visit the official uv documentation.

# Using Homebrew for macOS
brew install uv

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

3. Create and activate a virtual environment:

uv venv --python=python3.13
source .venv/bin/activate   # or `venv\Scripts\activate` on Windows

4. Install development dependencies:

uv sync

💻 Usage Examples

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%/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.

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.