iflow-mcp_arxiv-mcp-server 0.1.0

MCP server for accesing arXiv API

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

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 context of a 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

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.

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.