Search 1M+ open-access papers, standards, and case law from an AI agent.
Quick Install
Automated & IDE SetupCopy the AI prompt to install this server into Claude Code, Cursor, or another agent — or use 1-click editor setup below.
One-click editor setup isn’t available for this listing yet — we don’t have a confirmed install command, and we’d rather show nothing than point your editor at the wrong package or host. Follow the project’s own setup instructions, linked above.
Manual Client & Custom JSON ConfigExpand JSON ▾
No confirmed setup config for this listing yet. We only publish a config block when the install details come from the project itself — its README, its docs, or a verified owner. We haven’t found those for Conceptio Search, and we’d rather show nothing than a guess you’d paste into your client. Follow the project’s own setup instructions for the current steps.
Documentation Overview
conceptio-search
Search 1M+ open-access documents — papers, standards, textbooks, and case law — right from your terminal or your AI agent.
conceptio-search is a CLI and Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for the Conceptio Open Knowledge Archive — 1M+ open-access documents from 500+ living sources, indexed daily. Every source is open access or public domain. The CLI authenticates with an API key: sign in once, save the key, search from anywhere.
- For humans — search, export citations in 11 formats (BibTeX, APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE, Harvard, RIS, Bluebook, OSCOLA, ISO 690, ANSI Z39), and download PDFs to disk with one command.
- For AI agents — a stdio MCP server with eight tools, so Claude, Cursor, Windsurf, OpenCode, or any MCP client can search, queue batch searches, resolve identifiers (RFC, DOI, arXiv, PMID, PMCID, NIST/FIPS, W3C, US case citation), save PDFs into your workspace, and hand a document to Zotero or Obsidian.
- 100% self-contained — talks only to the public HTTPS API. No internal infrastructure; your key lives in
~/.conceptio/config.json.
Install
Requires Python 3.8+. (Checked, not just claimed: the suite parses every source file at the declared floor's grammar, so the promise cannot rot silently.)
The console script is conceptio; python -m conceptio_cli is the same entry
point for a virtualenv that was never activated.
Authenticate (one time)
The CLI needs an API key before it can search:
Get the key by signing in at conceptio.app and
creating one on your profile (Free, Dev, Pro, or Enterprise). The key is stored in
~/.conceptio/config.json and sent as X-Api-Key with every request.
conceptio quota reports your tier at any time. Every command below
assumes this step is done — without a key the CLI refuses to run and tells
you exactly this.
Quick start
Example
Query words are highlighted in gold in the title column. The PDF column shows
[x] when a direct PDF link is available; [ ] rows still surface the source
URL via conceptio info <id>.
Search directives
The CLI understands the same directives as the Conceptio web app — they are stripped from the query and applied as real filters:
| Directive | Example | Effect |
|---|---|---|
source: / src: | source:nist | Restrict to one or more sources (source:nist source:owasp) |
lang: / language: | lang:it | Restrict to a language (ISO code) |
category: / cat: | cat:"Law & Regulation" | Restrict to a category tab |
--license commercial-ok | --license commercial-ok | Keep only sources whose catalog metadata explicitly permits commercial use; this is a conservative filter, not a redistribution grant. |
Directives can be combined freely: conceptio search "cat:\"Computer Science & Tech\" source:nist lattice cryptography".
Resolve
conceptio resolve recognises several identifier shapes and returns a typed
response (kind: rfc | doi | arxiv | pmid | pmcid | nist | w3c | case plus
fallback null for plain text). Unrecognised identifiers degrade to a regular
search so the command never fails silently.
The kind describes the identifier, not the archive: a well-formed DOI this
archive does not hold answers with kind: "doi", total: 0 and an empty
results list, which is a correct empty answer rather than a failure. Every
example above resolves to at least one document today — the suite that drives
the shipped CLI against the live API asserts exactly that, so an example can
only rot if that check is skipped.
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
The conceptio mcp command starts a stdio JSON-RPC MCP server. It is dependency-free
(no MCP SDK required) and works with any MCP client.
The server is dual-era: it answers the current 2026-07-28 revision —
per-request _meta, server/discover, resultType, cache hints — and still
serves the older initialize handshake (2024-11-05 … 2025-11-25) for clients
that predate it. A client that speaks both eras probes with server/discover
first and finds us; a handshake client is served exactly as before.
A key is required for tool calls. The server starts without one, so a host can discover it and
read its tool list — and then answers every tools/call with an in-band error carrying the setup
steps. Hand it the key either way: run conceptio auth <key> once, or give it to the host through the
host's own environment, which is how the official registry listing declares it:
Tools
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
conceptio_search | Search the archive (query, optional limit 1–20, optional category). Returns structured results with titles, authors, years, source, snippet, and direct_pdf_url when available. |
conceptio_search_batch | Run multiple searches in one call — queue 1–50 as a background job and return an opaque handle (sync omitted/false), or set sync: true to run 1–10 immediately and return all results in one response. |
conceptio_resolve | Resolve a known identifier — RFC (RFC 2119), DOI (doi:10.1109/access.2020.2986772), arXiv (2604.08499), PubMed ID (PMID 41961061), PubMed Central ID (PMC10601397), NIST/FIPS designation (NIST FIPS 199), W3C spec shortname (w3c_digital-credentials), or US legal citation / docket (347 U.S. 483, 20-5364) — straight to its document(s). Unrecognised identifiers fall back to a text search. |
conceptio_download_pdf | Download the original open-access PDF for a Conceptio document ID or a direct PDF URL to a local path. |
conceptio_get_citation | Get a citation for a document ID in any of 11 formats (BibTeX, APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE, Harvard, RIS, Bluebook, OSCOLA, ISO 690, ANSI Z39). |
conceptio_get_document | Full metadata (title, author, source, category, license, year, language, URL, direct PDF URL, description) for a document ID. |
conceptio_connectors_send | Save one document to Zotero, or open a metadata-only Obsidian handoff. Server-side ownership, connector trial and failure semantics apply. |
conceptio_connectors_send_all | Bulk-save up to 500 document ids to Zotero. Requires Pro, institutional or licensed access — there is no free-trial path. |
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