Lune Research

@retrograde-labs/lune-mcp-server

Official Model Context Protocol server for Lune Research.

Exposes 12 tools and 6 guided research workflows (prompts) for searching, retrieving, comparing, and fact-checking academic papers across security, ML, NLP, CV, and systems venues, plus retrieval over your own uploaded workspace documents. Two transports:

• stdio: run locally via npx @retrograde-labs/lune-mcp-server. Reads LUNE_API_KEY from the environment.
• Streamable HTTP: hosted at https://mcp.luneresearch.com. Pass your PAT or OAuth token as Authorization: Bearer ....

Quick start (Claude Desktop, Cursor, etc.)

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

Get your token at https://luneresearch.com/dashboard/settings/credentials.

Tools

Tool	Description
search_papers	Hybrid vector + BM25 search across the corpus
search_papers_many	Run many query variants in one call, RRF-merged
search_related_papers	Semantically nearest papers to a given paper
get_paper_fulltext	Parsed full text (markdown or JSON)
get_paper_citations	Citation graph (cited_by or cites)
list_conferences	Indexed venues, optionally by category
get_conference_papers	Paginated papers for a venue
extract_from_papers	Structured field extraction across many papers
verify_claims	Fact-check claims against the corpus with quotes
gather_evidence	Judge evidence sufficiency for a task, with gaps + next queries
search_research_guidance	Curated reproducibility / methodology corpus
get_research_guidance_doc	Full text of a guidance document

Prompts

Reusable research workflows, surfaced by MCP clients as slash commands (e.g. /literature_review). Each runs a guided, multi-tool sequence grounded in the corpus, so common research tasks are one command instead of hand-orchestrating the tools.

Prompt	What it does	Key arguments
/literature_review	Survey a topic and synthesise themes, foundational vs recent work, and open gaps	topic (+ optional venues, since_year)
/find_related_work	From your abstract, find and organise prior work to cite and distinguish your contribution from	abstract (+ optional venues)
/compare_papers	Build a structured comparison table across papers, read from full text	topic (+ optional columns)
/verify_draft	Fact-check a draft or list of claims against the corpus, with a verbatim quote per claim	draft
/trace_citations	Trace a paper's lineage: its foundations, what built on it, and adjacent work	paper
/research_methodology	Grounded advice on experiment design, ablations, evaluation, rebuttals, or venue choice	question

Debugging with MCP Inspector

The repository pins MCP Inspector 2.3.0 and checks in a read-only server configuration for both protocol eras. Node 24 from .nvmrc satisfies the Inspector requirement.

With a PAT in LUNE_API_KEY, this builds the stdio server and opens the Inspector catalog with the PAT available to local processes. Select lune-stdio-modern to exercise 2026-07-28:

export LUNE_API_KEY=lune_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
bun run mcp:inspect

With no LUNE_API_KEY, the same command opens the server catalog without an environment override. Select lune-remote-modern; Inspector starts OAuth when you connect. The launcher never passes an empty -e assignment.

The printed URL contains a one-time Inspector token. Open that URL instead of typing the port manually. The Inspector stays on loopback with authentication enabled.

The hosted-server mnemonic opens the same catalog without building stdio:

bun run mcp:inspect:remote

The web, CLI, and TUI clients share OAuth state on disk. After signing in once, the CLI can check the hosted server without opening another browser:

bun run mcp:inspect:remote:check

The local stdio checks use a non-production test token and a deliberately dead API URL. They validate connection, version negotiation, and the tool catalog without consuming quota:

bun run mcp:inspect:check
bun run mcp:inspect:check:legacy
bun run mcp:inspect:tui

The local and remote configs at apps/mcp/inspector.*.config.json pin protocolEra explicitly. Inspector defaults to the legacy era, so an unconfigured launch does not prove 2026-07-28 behavior. During debugging, pin Protocol beside Console for stdio or Network for HTTP. Test invalid tool arguments, missing prompt arguments, both protocol eras, and expired OAuth tokens as well as successful calls.

Run the frozen official 2026-07-28 server requirements with:

bun run mcp:conformance

The conformance harness binds only 127.0.0.1 and injects a local test token. Its baseline names individual checks for diagnostic capabilities Lune does not advertise, such as image tools and readable resources. Every applicable check still gates the run, and a stale baseline entry fails when support is added. Never write diagnostics to stdout on stdio. The server and its cache write diagnostics to stderr so JSON-RPC framing stays intact.

License

MIT