ResearchZosho MCP server

ResearchZosho

研究蔵書, the research holdings. The Research Harness For The Rest Of Us.

Three people, one problem.

Your vet mentions a new drug for your dog's cancer. The follow-up is in three days. You want to know what the studies say: how well it works, for which breeds, and what the side effects are. The answer is spread across twenty papers, a regulator's review, and many pages that only look like medical advice.

You are tracing your family. Your great-grandfather is in the 1911 census in Osaka. By 1921 he is gone from every record the family knows about. Somewhere there are ship manifests, a prefecture's emigration lists, and an old newspaper notice. Most of them are in Japanese. None of them are on the first page of a search.

You are writing one chapter of a thesis on the influence of the Soviet-Afghan War on 1990s British science fiction. You have forty papers and articles saved, in three languages. You have one week to work out what they agree on, where they disagree, and what nobody has looked at yet.

None of that can be read in one evening. That is the job ResearchZosho does. You give it the question. It reads and notes each fact with the source it came from. When it is done, a write-up is waiting: what it found, where the sources disagree, and what it could not resolve. Every claim in it points at a source you can check. It keeps what it found, so the next question on the same subject does not start from zero. If a paper you used gets a new version, or two of your own findings contradict each other, it tells you.

Nothing counts as valid until you have reviewed it.

It runs on your own computer with a model you pick, local or hosted. It is free and open source. It is for anyone who needs reliable research done.

This is The Research Harness For The Rest Of Us.

→ LIBRARIANHOWTOUSE.md: how to use it day to day → LIBRARYPROTOCOL.md: for programmers, how a program talks to it → MODELS.md: which model to run, by your graphics card's VRAM, from what we measured

What you can do with it

Send it a question. It works out what needs answering. It reads in parallel: the web, and the scholarly literature by DOI through Crossref and OpenAlex. It writes the answer up in sections. It keeps going until the job is done, or for as long as you allow. It also reads sources in other languages, especially when the question points at a non-English language. The write-up says which languages its sources were in.

Check the answer. Every write-up ends with a table of the facts it used. Each fact has its source and a quote. A numbered list of unique sources follows. Before the write-up is shelved, each sentence that cites a source is checked against that source. A problem is called out. If it cannot read a source, because of a paywall, a login or another issue, it lists that source so you can supply the text yourself.

Keep bad sources out. A claim with one source stays a draft until a second, independent source backs it. A retracted paper disputes the claims that cite it. A site you ban is not used. A site you trust counts as a primary source.

Decide what stands. Each claim starts as a draft. You accept it, dispute it or retire it. The library uses what you accept next time.

Talk to it. researchzosho chat is a conversation with the Librarian. Ask what the shelves hold, ask a follow-up, say "find out …" to start a research run, ask "how did that go?", or go through the inbox. Every reply cites a look-up you can open. A figure it cannot back is marked as its guess. The same conversation is on the pages at /chat.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.