Citeassist (Citation Retrieval)

🚀 CiteAssist MCP Server

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that provides BibTeX citation data from CiteAs and Google Scholar. Enhance your research workflow by integrating citation retrieval directly into your application.

🚀 Quick Start

📦 Installation

Claude Desktop

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

For a development/unpublished server configuration:

"mcpServers": {
  "reference-mcp": {
    "command": "uv",
    "args": [
      "--directory",
      "/path/to/project/dir",
      "run",
      "reference-mcp"
    ]
  }
}

For a published server configuration:

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

Installation via Smithery

To automatically install reference-mcp for Claude Desktop via Smithery:

npx -y @smithery/cli install @ndchikin/reference-mcp --client claude

✨ Features

Tools

• get_citeas_data - Retrieve BibTeX citations for a specified resource from CiteAs.
  • resource (string, required): DOI, URL, or keyword.
• get_scholar_data - Retrieve BibTeX citations from Google Scholar.
  • query (string, required): Search query.
  • results (integer, optional): Number of results (default: 2).

🔧 Technical Details

Build and Publish

To prepare a distribution package:

1. Synchronize dependencies and update the lock file:

uv sync

2. Build the package distribution:

uv build

This will create source and wheel format distributions in the dist/ directory. 3. Publish to PyPI:

uv publish

Note: You need to set your PyPI credentials via environment variables or command-line arguments:

• Token: --token or UV_PUBLISH_TOKEN
• Or username/password: --username/UV_PUBLISH_USERNAME and --password/UV_PUBLISH_PASSWORD

Debugging

Since MCP servers run over stdio, debugging can be challenging. For the best debugging experience, we highly recommend using MCP Inspector.

You can start the MCP Inspector via npm using the following command:

npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector uv --directory /path/to/project/dir run reference-mcp

After starting, the Inspector will display a URL that you can access in your browser to begin debugging.