Scholar Feed

Scholar Feed MCP Server

Search 600,000+ CS/AI/ML research papers with LLM-generated novelty analysis, without leaving Claude Code, Cursor, or any MCP client. Built for researchers running a literature review where they already work: search, trace citations, pull full text, and export BibTeX in the same session.

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@latest 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 (1,000/day per account), 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."

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

Field orientation: "Give me an orientation report on sparse mixture-of-experts architectures."

Installation

The fastest path is npx scholar-feed-mcp@latest init, which auto-detects your client and writes the config. To set it up by hand, every client launches the same stdio server (npx -y scholar-feed-mcp@latest); only the config-file location and the wrapper key differ.

Claude Desktop (one-click) installs without editing any config: download the .mcpb bundle from the latest release and open it (or drag it into Settings > Extensions). The installer shows one optional field for a Scholar Feed API key (sf_...): leave it blank for anonymous mode (100 calls/day), or paste a free key from scholarfeed.org/settings for 1,000/day.

Claude Code takes a one-line command:

# Anonymous (100 calls/day)
claude mcp add scholar-feed -- npx -y scholar-feed-mcp@latest

# With an API key (1,000 calls/day per account)
claude mcp add scholar-feed -e SF_API_KEY=sf_your_key_here -- npx -y scholar-feed-mcp@latest

Every other client takes this standard JSON block:

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

To raise limits to 1,000 calls/day, add "env": { "SF_API_KEY": "sf_your_key_here" } to the server entry. Get a free key at scholarfeed.org/settings.

Drop that block into the right config file:

Client	Config file	Notes
Cursor	.cursor/mcp.json (project) or ~/.cursor/mcp.json (global)	Restart Cursor.
Claude Desktop	macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json; Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json	Settings → Developer → Edit Config, then restart.
Windsurf	~/.codeium/windsurf/mcp_config.json	Cascade → MCP icon → Configure, then refresh.
Cline / Roo Code	cline_mcp_settings.json	MCP Servers sidebar icon → Configure. Cline and Roo Code share this format.
Gemini CLI	~/.gemini/settings.json (or project .gemini/settings.json)
LM Studio	~/.lmstudio/mcp.json	Program tab → Install → Edit mcp.json. Follows Cursor's notation.
JetBrains (PyCharm / IntelliJ)	AI Assistant → MCP → Add → As JSON	Requires AI Assistant 2025.1+.

A few clients need a different wrapper key or file format:

VS Code (GitHub Copilot), Zed, Continue, and project-scoped configs