# A Two-Dimensional Study of the Model Context Protocol: Publication and Adoption

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.14721 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.14721/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 21 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent threats, guardrails and governance](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-threats-guardrails-and-governance/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [ChatGPT Outperforms Crowd-Workers for Text-Annotation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15056/) (2023)
- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- [Model Context Protocol (MCP) at First Glance: Studying the Security and Maintainability of MCP Servers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13538/) (2025)
- [What's in a GitHub Star? Understanding Repository Starring Practices in a Social Coding Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.07643/) (2018)
- [Topic Recommendation for Software Repositories using Multi-label Classification Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09116/) (2020)
- [Categorizing the Content of GitHub README Files](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06997/) (2018)
- [From REST to MCP: An Empirical Study of API Wrapping and Automated Server Generation for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16044/) (2025)
- [A Large-Scale Evolvable Dataset for Model Context Protocol Ecosystem and Security Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23474/) (2025)
- [How are AI agents used? Evidence from 177,000 MCP tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23802/) (2026)
- [What Makes a Popular Academic AI Repository?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02472/) (2020)
- [Real Faults in Model Context Protocol (MCP) Software: a Comprehensive Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05637/) (2026)
- [The Rise of GitHub in Scholarly Publications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04895/) (2022)
- [An Empirical Study of Challenges in Machine Learning Asset Management](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15990/) (2024)
- [GitHub Repositories with Links to Academic Papers: Public Access, Traceability, and Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00199/) (2020)
- [How do Software Engineering Researchers Use GitHub? An Empirical Study of Artifacts & Impact](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01566/) (2023)
- [A Large-Scale Dataset of MCP Implementations on GitHub](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10123/) (2026)
- [GitHub Marketplace for Automation and Innovation in Software Production](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05519/) (2024)
- [Analyzing GitHub Issues and Pull Requests in nf-core Pipelines: Insights into nf-core Pipeline Repositories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09612/) (2026)
- [A Metascience Study of the Low-Code Scientific Field](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05975/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Model Context Protocol (MCP), released by Anthropic in November 2024, standardizes how large language model applications connect to external tools and data sources. Despite MCP's rapid growth, no study has jointly characterized its emergence in the research literature, its adoption on GitHub and the relationship between them. We address this gap with a longitudinal, two-dimensional study of 802 MCP-related publications and 33,319 GitHub repositories. We characterize their growth and identify their application domains via BERTopic and usage contexts via a human-validated GPT-5.6-Luna classifier. We find that publications and repositories began rapid growth within a month of each other in 2025, and peaked together in March 2026. Notably, a second growth wave alone accounts for 49.5% of the GitHub repositories. Most publications (57.8%) and nearly all repositories (93.7%) use MCP as an enabling technology rather than for analyzing, evaluating, extending, or securing it directly. Among repositories, the latter category concentrates almost entirely in one general-purpose topic, while applied usage spreads into product-specific niches. Finally, we provide an overview of the MCP landscape and recommendations to researchers and practitioners in this field.