Web Researcher MCP

✨ Academic Research Workflow

This release turns Web Researcher from "search papers" into trace, iterate on, and package a literature review — without ever crossing into answer synthesis (it stays infrastructure, not an autonomous agent). Seven issues, all shipped:

New providers & enrichment

• Semantic Scholar (#49) — 200M+ papers with AI tldr summaries, citation intent labels, and an influence flag. Works key-free at the shared rate; set SEMANTIC_SCHOLAR_API_KEY to raise it.
• Unpaywall open-access enrichment (#45) — automatically fills free-PDF links on DOI-bearing academic_search results that lack one. Best-effort, never overwrites a provider's own PDF. Set UNPAYWALL_EMAIL (or it reuses OPENALEX_EMAIL).

New tools

• citation_graph (#47) — map a paper's citation neighborhood: works that cite it (forward) and works it cites (backward), from a DOI or title. Semantic Scholar gives rich intent+influence; OpenAlex gives counts.
• research_export (#65) — export a sequential_search session as a shareable markdown report (per-step reasoning, confidence, gaps, numbered sources) or full JSON.
• format_bibliography (#86) — turn a session or an explicit source list into an APA / MLA / BibTeX bibliography, de-duplicated and deterministically ordered.

sequential_search upgrades

• depth (#67) — quick (default, unchanged), standard (coverage analysis + suggested refinement queries), or thorough (auto-runs up to 3 bounded refinement searches, provenance-tagged). Never synthesizes an answer.
• Cross-call error aggregation (#99) — get_research_session now surfaces errorPatterns (recurring auth-walls/blocks/rate-limits, gated at ≥3 occurrences) and per-provider providerStats, so the LLM can adapt strategy mid-research.

Docs

• Tool schemas · Error handling · Deployment & env vars

What's Changed

Full changelog: https://github.com/zoharbabin/web-researcher-mcp/compare/v1.17.0...v1.18.0

Changelog

New Features

• fa56af4d60976373961a155e7c070a22f935a589: feat(academic): Academic Research Workflow — citation graph, OA enrichment, export, depth & error aggregation (@zoharbabin)

Bug Fixes

• ba99bfa7b75ca9714059c8baa7d7768cd9554c9d: fix(academic): address merge-gate adversarial audit findings (@zoharbabin)

Other

• 3b99500e05b47b789713f8c07322a26e2763be6a: Merge pull request #139 from zoharbabin/feat/academic-research-workflow (@zoharbabin)
• 601c85270b332b343a0dd7b4f07fbf943d0bc74c: Merge pull request #140 from zoharbabin/chore/release-v1.18.0 (@zoharbabin)
• 1686887b4fbaaa730e368f6619454c05e3e97e1c: Update README.md (@zoharbabin)
• 5666f201890795064929d1aeff20eedcededf49c: chore(release): v1.18.0 (@zoharbabin)
• 43a38bc19ba1963a1e7e3f5244270426ea902c12: docs(demo): add grounded-answer scene + refresh demo recording for v1.17.0 (#138) (@zoharbabin)
• d0ce22ed8036344a9a3910b2c3c4a3d643f8b6a7: docs(readme): complete MCP connect step in "Get started in 30 seconds" (#137) (@zoharbabin)
• 05b325b2a5e969fd04cf1f650873e81e4e7961c6: docs(readme): refresh for v1.17.0 and remove provider favoritism (#136) (@zoharbabin)

Docker Images

# GitHub Container Registry
docker pull ghcr.io/zoharbabin/web-researcher-mcp:1.18.0

# Docker Hub
docker pull docker.io/zoharbabin/web-researcher-mcp:1.18.0

Homebrew

brew install zoharbabin/tap/web-researcher-mcp

Verify Checksums

sha256sum -c checksums.txt