Valency — Research Corpus Plugin for Claude Code
The plugin exposes seven skills that turn natural-language questions into structured queries against millions of research papers via the Valency MCP server. Each skill can be triggered by a slash command (e.g. /valency:profile) or conversationally.
What the plugin adds is orchestration: each skill is a prescribed chain of tool calls, not a single search. /valency:reading-list doesn't just search an author's work. It pulls their most-cited and most-recent papers, clusters them into intellectual threads, finds similar work per thread, then flags papers that surface across multiple threads. That kind of multi-step dance is what the skills encode.
Prerequisites
You need the Valency MCP server configured in your Claude Code session. The recommended install is:
claude mcp add --transport http valency-mcp https://labs.valency.io/mcp
The plugin detects whatever name you pick at session start, but using the canonical name (valency-mcp) keeps the permissions snippet below working as-is. See the Valency docs for alternative setup options.
Installation
Add the Valency marketplace and install the plugin:
claude plugin marketplace add valency-oss/valency-claude-plugin
claude plugin install valency
Then restart Claude Code. The plugin persists across sessions.
Auto-approve MCP tool calls (recommended)
By default, Claude Code will prompt you to approve each Valency tool call. Since these are read-only queries, you can auto-approve them by adding to the permissions allow list in your global settings (~/.claude/settings.json):
{
"permissions": {
"allow": [
"mcp__valency-mcp__*"
]
}
}
If you connected Valency through a Claude.ai web integration instead of the CLI, replace mcp__valency-mcp__* with the prefix shown in the session-start notice (typically mcp__claude_ai_Valency_Systems_Inc__*).
Alternative: one-off session
To try the plugin without installing:
git clone https://github.com/valency-oss/valency-claude-plugin.git
claude --plugin-dir ./valency-claude-plugin
Usage
TL;DR: Claude auto-invokes the right skill from natural-language questions. No specific process required. Read on if you want to trigger specific skills explicitly via slash commands.
Profile — researcher overview
/valency:profile Yoshua Bengio
Or just ask naturally:
Who is Yoshua Bengio?
What does Sara Walker work on?
Show me Daphne Koller's publications
Landscape — field overview
/valency:landscape cs.LG
/valency:landscape protein folding
Or:
What's happening in machine learning?
Give me an overview of single cell RNA sequencing
Who are the top authors in cs.AI?
Similar — find related papers
/valency:similar 1706.03762
/valency:similar Attention Is All You Need
Or:
Find papers similar to Attention Is All You Need
What's related to 2301.07041?
Trends — topic evolution over time
/valency:trends cs.AI
/valency:trends CRISPR
/valency:trends cs.LG, cs.CL
Or:
Is cs.AI growing?
When did CRISPR research take off?
Compare machine learning vs natural language processing trends
Network — collaboration mapping
/valency:network Yoshua Bengio
Or:
Who does Yoshua Bengio collaborate with?
Show me Jennifer Doudna's research network
Find connections between researchers in protein folding
How has David Hogg's work diverged from his coauthors?
The network skill also produces a Divergence Analysis section showing how each top collaborator's research focus has drifted from the focal author's — useful for understanding how a researcher's intellectual position has shifted relative to their closest peers.
Reading list — curated bibliography for a researcher
/valency:reading-list David W. Hogg
Or:
What should David Hogg be reading next?
Build me a reading list for Yoshua Bengio
Find adjacent literature for Sara Walker's research
Triangulates off the author's most-cited and most-recent papers to surface 5–8 recommendations per intellectual thread, with cross-thread papers (those that connect multiple threads of the author's work) highlighted separately.
Fresh collaborators — expand a researcher's network
/valency:fresh-collaborators David W. Hogg
Or:
Who should David Hogg be talking to that he isn't already?
Find new potential collaborators for Yoshua Bengio
Who are the new faces working on stellar dynamics that Jo Bovy doesn't know yet?
Returns researchers doing recent (last 12–18 months) thematically relevant work who are not in the focal author's existing top-100 coauthor network. Each candidate is tagged junior/senior and attributed to the theme(s) that surfaced them.
License
This repo is MIT-licensed. See LICENSE.
