API & MCP Access

paperKB provides an MCP (Model Context Protocol) endpoint for AI tool integration with your knowledge bases. The main purpose of this is to allow you to integrate paperKB KBs with external AI tools, not just the chat interface available here. So, if you have a subscription to Claude or ChatGPT, then this is how you can use your own tools to interact with a KB.

API keys

Generate a personal API key from Settings → API Keys:

1. Click Generate key and give it a name (e.g. "claude-desktop").
2. Copy the key immediately — it's shown only once.
3. After creation, only the first few characters are displayed.

Keys can be revoked at any time from the same page. Revoked keys stop working immediately.

Use your key in any MCP request as a Bearer token:

Authorization: Bearer sk-your-key-here

MCP endpoint

Each knowledge base exposes an MCP endpoint for AI tool integration. This uses the streamable HTTP transport (the modern MCP standard) and is compatible with Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and any MCP-aware AI agent.

URL:    https://paperkb.org/{owner}/{kb}/mcp
Header: Authorization: Bearer sk-…

Available tools

Tool	Description
paperkb_query	Semantic search across the KB — returns ranked passages with citations
paperkb_get_paper	Get full details for a paper by its internal ID or PMID
paperkb_search_papers	Look up papers by title or author name
paperkb_get_author	Get author details, papers, co-authors, and affiliations
paperkb_search_authors	Look up authors by name

Setting up Claude Desktop

Add to your claude_desktop_config.json (usually ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json on macOS):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "paperkb": {
      "type": "streamablehttp",
      "url": "https://paperkb.org/{owner}/{kb}/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer sk-YOUR_KEY_HERE"
      }
    }
  }
}

Replace {owner}/{kb} with your KB path (e.g. mylab/coga-kb) and sk-YOUR_KEY_HERE with your API key. Restart Claude Desktop to pick up the change.

Once connected, Claude can search your KB, look up papers, and retrieve author information directly during conversations.

Setting up Claude Code

claude mcp add paperkb --transport streamablehttp \
  --url "https://paperkb.org/{owner}/{kb}/mcp" \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer sk-YOUR_KEY_HERE"

Other MCP clients

Any MCP client that supports the streamable HTTP transport can connect. The endpoint accepts standard MCP initialize, tools/list, and tools/call requests.