Scholar Feed

Scholar Feed MCP Server

Research paper search with ranking and citation tracking, for LLM engineering and academic research, without leaving Claude Code, Cursor, or any MCP client.

Most paper tools hand back a flat list. Scholar Feed ranks it: sort by relevance, by proven citation count, or by rising impact, then trace any paper's citation lineage forward and backward across 22M+ edges. 600k+ CS/AI/ML papers, updated daily, each with an LLM-generated summary and novelty score.

Scholar Feed indexes arXiv papers daily and ranks them on recency, citation velocity, institutional reputation, and code availability.

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 200 calls/month, enough for a typical research session. For a higher quota (500/month per account) plus your library — collections, saved papers and watches — 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 (200 calls/month), or paste a free key from scholarfeed.org/settings for 500/month.

Claude Code takes a one-line command:

# Anonymous (200 calls/month)

claude mcp add scholar-feed -- npx -y scholar-feed-mcp@latest

With an API key (500 calls/month 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 the quota to 500 calls/month, 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:

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

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

OpenAI Codex (~/.codex/config.toml, or $CODEX_HOME/config.toml if you set that) uses TOML, not JSON — the block above will not work. One file serves both the Codex CLI and the IDE extension.

[mcp_servers.scholar-feed]

command = "npx" args = ["-y", "scholar-feed-mcp@latest"] env = { SF_API_KEY = "sf_your_key_here" }

Drop the env line to run keyless at 200 calls/month. On Windows, if Codex cannot launch the server, use command = "cmd" with args = ["/c", "npx", "-y", "scholar-feed-mcp@latest"].

VS Code: GitHub Copilot (.vscode/mcp.json) uses a servers key and an explicit type, and needs Copilot agent mode. You can also run MCP: Add Server from the Command Palette.

{

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

Zed (settings.json) uses a context_servers key, and the "source": "custom" line is required (without it, Zed silently skips the entry).

{

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

Continue uses YAML, with mcpServers as a list, in ~/.continue/config.yaml (global) or .continue/config.yaml (workspace).

mcpServers:

• name: scholar-feed type: stdio command: npx args:
• "-y"
• scholar-feed-mcp@latest

Project-scoped (.mcp.json), to share the server across a repo:

{

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

Windows: for any JSON config above, use "command": "cmd" and "args": ["/c", "npx", "-y", "scholar-feed-mcp@latest"].

Scholar Feed is a standard stdio MCP server, so any other MCP-compatible client works with the standard block too.

Available Tools (27)

Core Search & Discovery

Authors

Embeddings

Research

Library, Collections, Watches & Gap Analysis (require SF_API_KEY)

These MUTATE or read the authenticated user's account. The core read/search tools above work anonymously; these need a key.

| find_gaps | "What am I missing?" for a collection or topic: foundational + frontier work you haven't saved (read-only,