Resp

A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for scholarly paper search. It gives LLMs and coding agents structured tools to search academic papers, traverse citation graphs, and discover related work across arXiv, Semantic Scholar, OpenReview, OpenAlex, DBLP, Crossref, the ACL Anthology, and the major AI / ML / NLP / CV conference proceedings — all returned as clean, normalized JSON records.

This is the MCP server for resp: the same paper-collection capabilities, exposed as tools any MCP client can call.

Key Features

• One tool per source. Dedicated tools for arXiv, Semantic Scholar, OpenReview, OpenAlex, DBLP, Crossref, ACM, Connected Papers, and the ACL Anthology.
• Conference-aware search. A single search_conference tool routes to the right source for 27 venues (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICML, NeurIPS, AAAI, EMNLP, IJCAI, and more) — you pass a name and year, it handles the rest.
• Citation graph. Fetch citations, references, and related papers for any paper by id, DOI, or arXiv id.
• Normalized output. Every tool returns the same paper schema (title, authors, year, venue, abstract, doi, pdf_url, num_citations, link, …), so results merge cleanly across sources.
• No keys required. Works out of the box; a free Semantic Scholar key is optional for higher rate limits.
• Lightweight. Pure Python, only requests + beautifulsoup4 + mcp.

Requirements

• Python 3.9 or newer
• Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, or any other MCP client

Getting started

Install the server:

pip install git+https://github.com/monk1337/resp_mcp

This installs a resp-mcp command. Standard MCP config works in most clients:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "resp": {
      "command": "resp-mcp"
    }
  }
}

Claude Code

Add the server with one command:

claude mcp add resp -- resp-mcp

Or, without installing, run it as a module:

claude mcp add resp -- python -m respmcp.server

Then verify it's connected:

claude mcp list

Claude Desktop

Add this to your claude_desktop_config.json (Settings → Developer → Edit Config):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "resp": {
      "command": "resp-mcp",
      "env": {
        "SEMANTIC_SCHOLAR_API_KEY": "",
        "RESP_CONTACT_EMAIL": "[email protected]"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart the app and the Resp tools appear in the tool picker.

Cursor / Windsurf / other clients

Use the same standard config block shown in Getting started — point the command at resp-mcp (or python -m respmcp.server).

Configuration

The server is configured through environment variables:

Variable	Description
SEMANTIC_SCHOLAR_API_KEY	Optional Semantic Scholar API key to raise rate limits for the Semantic Scholar and citation tools.
RESP_CONTACT_EMAIL	Contact email sent to OpenAlex and Crossref for their higher-throughput "polite pool".
RESP_CACHE_DIR	Where the ACL Anthology index is cached. Defaults to ~/.cache/resp-mcp.
RESP_MCP_TRANSPORT	stdio (default) or http for streamable HTTP transport.

HTTP transport

To run the server over HTTP instead of stdio:

RESP_MCP_TRANSPORT=http resp-mcp

Then point your MCP client at the HTTP endpoint:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "resp": {
      "url": "http://localhost:8000/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Tools

Paper search

Tool	Description
search_arxiv	Search arXiv by keyword.
search_semantic_scholar	Search Semantic Scholar, with optional year range.
search_openreview	Search OpenReview submissions (ICLR, NeurIPS tracks, …).
search_openalex	Search OpenAlex with year / host / open-access filters.
search_dblp	Search DBLP, with an optional venue filter.
search_acl	Search the ACL Anthology.
search_acm	Search ACM Digital Library papers.
search_connected_papers	Search the Connected Papers corpus.

Conference proceedings

Tool	Description
search_conference	Search any known conference by name + year; auto-routes to the right source.
list_conferences	List all supported conferences and how each is fetched.
search_neurips	Search a NeurIPS proceedings year.
search_ijcai	Search an IJCAI proceedings year.
search_cvf	Search CVF proceedings (CVPR / ICCV / WACV) for a year.
search_eccv	Search ECCV proceedings.
search_pmlr	Search a PMLR volume (e.g. v235 for ICML 2024).
search_aaai	Search AAAI proceedings.

Supported conferences (search_conference): CVPR, ICCV, WACV, ECCV, ICML, AISTATS, UAI, COLT, ACML, CoLLAs, ACL, EMNLP, EACL, NAACL, CoNLL, COLING, LREC, TACL, Findings, IJCAI, NeurIPS, AAAI, ICPR, KDD, WWW, SIGIR, ICDM.

Citation graph

Tool	Description
get_citations	Papers that cite a given paper (by S2 id, DOI, or arXiv:<id>).
get_references	Papers referenced by a given paper.
get_related_papers	Related papers for a title, query, or paper id.

Aggregate

Tool	Description
search_all	Search several sources at once and merge / de-duplicate the results.

Example prompts

Once connected, you can ask your agent things like:

• "Search arXiv for recent papers on mixture-of-experts routing."
• "Find EMNLP 2023 papers about retrieval-augmented generation."
• "Get the papers that cite arXiv:1706.03762."
• "Find work related to 'Attention Is All You Need'."
• "Search CVPR 2024 and ECCV 2024 for gaussian splatting papers."

Programmatic usage

The same capabilities are available as a Python library:

from respmcp import Resp

resp = Resp()  # optional: Resp(semantic_scholar_api_key="...")

papers  = resp.arxiv("multi-label text classification", max_results=10)
citing  = resp.citations("arXiv:1706.03762", max_results=20)
related = resp.related_papers("attention is all you need")
icml    = resp.conference("ICML", "diffusion models", year=2024)

for p in papers:
    print(p.year, p.title, p.link)

Development

git clone https://github.com/monk1337/resp_mcp
cd resp_mcp
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest -q            # live integration tests (network required)

License

MIT