Scholar Feed MCP Server

Search 560,000+ CS/AI/ML research papers with LLM-powered novelty analysis from Claude Code, Cursor, or any MCP client.

Scholar Feed indexes arXiv papers daily and ranks them using a multi-signal scoring system (recency, citation velocity, institutional reputation, code availability). Each paper has an LLM-generated summary and novelty score.

Quick Start

npx scholar-feed-mcp init

This interactive wizard will:

1. Optionally ask for an API key (or skip for anonymous access)
2. Detect your MCP client (Claude Code, Cursor, or Claude Desktop)
3. Write the config and verify the connection

No API key required. Anonymous access gives you 100 calls/day — enough for a typical research session. For higher limits (500/day), get a free key at scholarfeed.org/settings.

Try asking: "Search for recent papers on test-time compute scaling"

What You Can Do

Technology scouting — "What novel research on retrieval-augmented generation was published this month?"

Literature review — "Find papers similar to 2401.04088 and export their BibTeX"

Trend monitoring — "What's trending in cs.CV this week? Summarize the top 3."

Deep dives — "Run a deep research session on 'reasoning in large language models'"

Benchmark tracking — "Show me the MMLU leaderboard and compare GPT-4 vs LLaMA-3"

Author discovery — "Who are the top researchers working on efficient LLM inference?"

Manual Installation

Claude Code

# Without API key (anonymous, 100 calls/day)
claude mcp add scholar-feed -- npx -y scholar-feed-mcp

# With API key (500 calls/day)
claude mcp add scholar-feed -e SF_API_KEY=sf_your_key_here -- npx -y scholar-feed-mcp

Cursor (.cursor/mcp.json)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "scholar-feed": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "scholar-feed-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

To add an API key, add "env": { "SF_API_KEY": "sf_your_key_here" } to the config.

Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "scholar-feed": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "scholar-feed-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Project-scoped (.mcp.json)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "scholar-feed": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "scholar-feed-mcp"],
      "env": { "SF_API_KEY": "${SF_API_KEY}" }
    }
  }
}

Windows note: Use "command": "cmd" and "args": ["/c", "npx", "-y", "scholar-feed-mcp"].

Available Tools (23)

Core Search & Discovery

Paper Content

Benchmarks & Methods

Authors

Research

Utility

Novelty Score

Every paper has an llm_novelty_score from 0.0 to 1.0:

Use novelty_min: 0.5 in search_papers to filter for genuinely novel work.

Rate Limits

Responses include X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining, and X-RateLimit-Reset headers.

Example Response

search_papers with q: "attention mechanism" returns:

{
  "papers": [
    {
      "arxiv_id": "2401.04088",
      "title": "Attention Is All You Need (But Not All You Get)",
      "authors": ["A. Researcher", "B. Scientist"],
      "year": 2024,
      "categories": ["cs.LG", "cs.AI"],
      "primary_category": "cs.LG",
      "arxiv_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.04088",
      "has_code": true,
      "github_url": "https://github.com/example/repo",
      "citation_count": 42,
      "rank_score": 0.73,
      "llm_summary": "Proposes a sparse attention variant that reduces compute by 60% while matching dense attention accuracy on 5 benchmarks.",
      "llm_novelty_score": 0.55
    }
  ],
  "total": 1847,
  "page": 1,
  "limit": 20,
  "next_cursor": "eyJzIjogMC43MywgImlkIjogIjI0MDEuMDQwODgifQ=="
}

Pass next_cursor back to get the next page (keyset pagination — more stable than page numbers for large result sets).

Verify Installation

After setup, ask your AI assistant to run check_connection. You should see:

{
  "status": "ok",
  "plan": "free",
  "key_name": "my-key",
  "usage_today": 0
}

Environment Variables

Development

npm install
npm run build      # Build to build/
npm run dev        # Watch mode
npm run typecheck  # Type check without emitting
npm test           # Run tests

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

Troubleshooting

"Authentication failed: your SF_API_KEY is invalid" The key may have been revoked. Generate a new one at scholarfeed.org/settings. Or remove the key to use anonymous mode.

"Rate limit exceeded" or "Anonymous daily limit exceeded" Anonymous mode allows 100 calls/day. Get a free API key at scholarfeed.org/settings for 500 calls/day.

Tool calls time out or fail silently Ensure Node.js 18+ is installed (node --version). Older versions lack the native fetch API.

Stale npx cache If you're stuck on an old version after an update: npx --yes scholar-feed-mcp@latest

Windows: "command not found" Use "command": "cmd" with "args": ["/c", "npx", "-y", "scholar-feed-mcp"] in your MCP config.

License

MIT