CiteAssist MCP server

A Model Context Protocol server that provides BibTeX-formatted citation data from CiteAs and Google Scholar. Enhance your research workflow by integrating citation retrieval directly into your applications.

Components

Tools

• get_citeas_data - Retrieve BibTeX-formatted citation for the specified resource from the CiteAs

  • resource (string, required): DOI, URL, keyword

• get_scholar_data - Retrieve BibTeX-formatted citations from the Google Scholar

  • query (string, required): Search query

  • results (integer, optional): Number of results (default: 2)

Related MCP server: bib-enrich-mcp

Quickstart

Install

Claude Desktop

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

On Windows: %APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

Development/Unpublished Servers Configuration:

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

Published Servers Configuration:

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

Installing via Smithery

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

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

Development

Building and Publishing

To prepare the package for distribution:

1. Sync dependencies and update lockfile:

uv sync

2. Build package distributions:

uv build

This will create source and wheel distributions in the dist/ directory.

3. Publish to PyPI:

uv publish

Note: You'll need to set PyPI credentials via environment variables or command flags:

• 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 strongly recommend using the MCP Inspector.

You can launch the MCP Inspector via npm with this command:

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

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