Lacuna Research MCP: a machine learning research map for your AI app

Add Lacuna to Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor

1. 1Click Connect Lacuna Research free. There's no sign-in, so its tools are ready at once.
2. 2All 13 tools read from Lacuna's research graph. Keep `search_lacuna` and `get_paper` at a minimum, and switch off the author and institution lookups if your work is about papers rather than people.
3. 3Add ContextGate to your AI app as a connector or MCP server. The steps for each app are on the Works with page.
4. 4Ask your AI app for recent papers in a research direction such as diffusion models for audio, then open Activity to see the `search_lacuna` and `get_direction_papers` calls.

Research questions Lacuna can answer

• Search papers, research directions, authors, venues and institutions with `search_lacuna`.
• Open a paper with `get_paper` and include its linked code repositories, datasets, models and demos.
• Explore a research direction and page through its papers with `get_direction_papers`.
• Inspect a generated research proposal with `get_hypothesis`.

Lacuna's server has 13 tools; these are four of them.

An audit trail for literature searches

• Activity records each call, so you can retrace how your AI app found a paper.
• Switch off the author tools, such as `get_author_neighbors`, and calls to them are refused.

What you get with Lacuna Research and ContextGate

• Your AI apps can use Lacuna ResearchClaude, Cursor, ChatGPT and other AI apps reach Lacuna Research through the one ContextGate connection you add to them.
• You choose which tools they can useSwitch off any Lacuna Research tool you don't want used. It's hidden from your AI apps and refused if called.
• Every call is checked and recordedYour policies check each call (for example, personal data is hidden and secrets are blocked), and Activity keeps a record of it.

ContextGate sees only the tool calls that go through it, not your AI app's built-in tools or your chats.

Lacuna Research tools

Examples of what your AI apps can do in Lacuna Research. You'll see the exact list of tools after you connect it.

• search_lacunaSearch Lacuna's ML/AI corpus for papers, research directions, authors, venues, institutions, novel research hypotheses, and research resources (code rep
• get_hypothesisFetch a generated novel ML/AI research proposal from Lacuna. Use after search_lacuna(search_type="hypothesis") to inspect a proposal. view selects the
• get_directionFetch a Lacuna research direction/cluster. Use a numeric cluster ID (for example 25005) or a direction URL ending in that number. view selects the
• get_direction_papersFetch paginated papers associated with a Lacuna research direction/cluster. view selects the per-paper shape: - "compact" (default, recommended): cita
• get_paperFetch a Lacuna paper by artifact id or paper URL. include_resources adds linked resources (code repositories, datasets, models, and demos) in context a
• get_resourceFetch a Lacuna research resource (code repository, dataset, model, or demo). Accepts a resource artifact ID (art_...) or a Lacuna resource URL containi
• get_author_papersFetch one page of an author's papers, ordered from newest to oldest.
• get_author_directionsFetch one page of an author's named research directions.
• get_author_contextFetch agent-oriented context for a Lacuna author. Author profiles describe research output (papers, directions, impact). A free-text `affiliation` fiel
• get_author_neighborsFetch one ranked page of neighboring/similar Lacuna authors.
• get_venue_contextFetch agent-oriented context for a Lacuna venue, optionally scoped to a year. Venue keys are opaque hashes (e.g. "d7bf22905bd6"), never human-readable
• get_institution_contextFetch agent-oriented context for a Lacuna institution. view selects the response shape: - "context" (default, recommended): compact institution contex
• get_institution_authorsFetch one page of authors affiliated with a Lacuna institution. Results are ordered by paper count. Use authors_total, authors_returned, authors_offset