@retrograde-labs/lune-mcp-server

The official Lune Research MCP server. It gives an AI agent a literature habit: full-text search over top-tier venues, citation trails, figure design references, and a curated corpus of research best practices.

Every answer your agent gives can rest on a paper it actually read, quoted by title, authors and venue, instead of on recall.

Install

Hosted (recommended). One endpoint, OAuth in the browser, no token to paste or rotate:

https://mcp.luneresearch.com

Claude Code:

claude mcp add lune --transport http https://mcp.luneresearch.com

Cursor, Codex, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Manus and the rest have their own wording for "add a custom connector". The Install page carries a copy-pasteable recipe for each, and the docs explain the flow.

Local stdio. For clients that only speak stdio, run the package directly and hand it a personal access token:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "lune": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@retrograde-labs/lune-mcp-server"],
      "env": { "LUNE_API_KEY": "lune_your_personal_access_token" }
    }
  }
}

Mint a token at Settings -> Credentials. The server reads LUNE_API_KEY from the environment and writes diagnostics to stderr, never stdout, so JSON-RPC framing stays intact.

Tools

Fourteen tools. search_* finds candidates, get_* retrieves something you already have a handle on, and list_* browses. A fifteenth, get_more_tools, is offered alongside them so an agent can report a capability Lune is missing; it is not there if you opt out of analytics.

Finding papers

Tool	What it does
`search_papers`	Hybrid vector + BM25 search over the corpus
`search_papers_many`	Many query variants in one call, merged by reciprocal rank fusion
`search_related_papers`	The nearest neighbours of a paper you already have
`list_conferences`	Indexed venues, optionally filtered by category
`get_conference_papers`	One venue's papers, paginated

Reading them

Tool	What it does
`get_paper_fulltext`	Parsed full text, as markdown or JSON
`get_paper_citations`	The citation graph, in either direction

Working across many at once

Tool	What it does
`extract_from_papers`	Pull the same structured fields out of a set of papers
`verify_claims`	Fact-check claims against the corpus, returning a quote per claim
`gather_evidence`	Judge whether the evidence is sufficient yet, and name what is missing

Designing figures

Tool	What it does
`search_figure_references`	Published figures matching a composition, with the design analysis of each
`get_paper_figures`	Every extracted figure from one paper, with captions and analysis

Doing the work well

Tool	What it does
`search_research_guidance`	The curated methodology and reproducibility corpus
`get_research_guidance_doc`	The full text of one guidance document

Prompts

Seven guided workflows, which MCP clients surface as slash commands. Each one runs a multi-tool sequence grounded in the corpus, so a common research task is one command instead of an orchestration you have to think about.

Prompt	What it does	Arguments
`/literature_review`	Survey a topic: the foundational work, the recent work, and the gaps between them	`topic` (+ `venues`, `since_year`)
`/find_related_work`	Read your abstract, then find the prior work to cite and distinguish yourself from	`abstract` (+ `venues`)
`/compare_papers`	Build a comparison table across papers, read out of their full text	`topic` (+ `columns`)
`/verify_draft`	Fact-check a draft against the corpus, with a verbatim quote per claim	`draft`
`/trace_citations`	Trace a paper's lineage: what it stands on, what stands on it	`paper`
`/design_figure`	Study how the target venue draws this kind of figure, then plan and draft yours	`figure` (+ `venue`, `role`)
`/research_methodology`	Grounded advice on experiment design, ablations, evaluation, rebuttals, venues	`question`

Authentication and scopes

Both transports accept a Lune personal access token (lune_*); the hosted transport also accepts an OAuth access token, which is what the one-click client installs use. Send either as Authorization: Bearer ....

Tools declare the scope they need, and a token is only ever granted what you give it. papers:read covers the corpus, full text, citations and figures, guidance:read covers the research-guidance corpus, and account:read reads your identity and quota. A call made without the scope fails with both the scope it wanted and the scopes you hold, so the agent can say what to fix rather than guess.

Revoking a token or an app on the Credentials page takes effect immediately.

Transports

Transport	Where	Protocol
Streamable HTTP	`https://mcp.luneresearch.com`	MCP 2026-07-28 and 2025-era
stdio	`npx @retrograde-labs/lune-mcp-server`	MCP 2026-07-28 and 2025-era

The hosted transport is stateless per request: the credential arrives on every call, so a client that has been idle for hours keeps working without re-initializing.

Support

Bug reports and feature requests go to the issue tracker. For anything account-related, or to report a security issue, see SECURITY.md and the documentation.

License

MIT

Lune Research

Links

README