An AI Interface for Research Papers
A new working paper introduces a Model Context Protocol (MCP) that allows users to interact with research data using natural language. This innovation aims to enhance the accessibility and flexibility of empirical research by enabling users to run additional analyses and create new visualizations. The MCP is designed to facilitate replication and investigation while retaining the benefits of traditional research papers.
- ▪The MCP enables users to ask questions about the data and run regressions not included in the original paper.
- ▪It allows for the creation of new plots and subsetting of data for further analysis.
- ▪The MCP serves as a standardized interface for AI applications to connect with research data and tools.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hacker News (Newest) |
| Canonical URL | https://justinross.substack.com/p/an-ai-interface-for-research-papers |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 17:24:50 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T17:37:39.277Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T17:37:39.277Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | I_7uTAW_jGIf |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
An AI Interface for Research PapersThe Research Paper Isn't Dead (Yet!)Justin RossMay 22, 202662ShareI have a new working paper out (with Whitney Afonso and Denvil Duncan) that does something I haven’t seen before in a research paper: a Model Context Protocol (MCP) that provides a structured way of interacting with the paper via a Large Language Model. I’m going to show you first what I did, and then tell you what I think the opportunities are available at present for scientific research papers.Without specifics, our paper introduces a pair of randomized treatments (Priority and Performance) to elicit people’s stated preferences. We do all the normal things of a research paper: collect data about the survey respondents, show various tables, figures, and regression results.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (Newest).
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