paperpal

MCP Extension to aid you in searching and writing literature reviews

Check out this conversation with Claude to see what it can do

How it works

paperpal gives your LLMs access to arxiv, Hugging Face papers and semantic scholar. You can then have a natural conversation with your favourite LLMs (e.g. Claude) and have it guide you.

You can:

• Discuss papers
• Look for new papers
• Organize ideas for liteature reviews
• etc.

Of course, this tool is as good as the sum of its parts. LLMs can still hallucinate, and semantic search is never perfect.

Quickstart

There are many different ways with which you can interact with an MCP server.

Claude Desktop App

If this is your first time using an MCP server for Claude Desktop App, see https://modelcontextprotocol.io/quickstart/user

First, clone this repository locally:

git clone https://github.com/milatechtransfer/paperpal

Next, add the extension to your app. Open your configuration file (on macOS this should be ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json) and and add the following to the extension:

For example on MacOS:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "paperpal": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": [
        "--directory",
        "/Users/<username>/paperpal/paperpal",
        "run",
        "mcp_server.py"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Restart your Claude Desktop App and you should see it appear.

Cursor

If this is your first time using an MCP server for Cursor, see https://docs.cursor.com/context/model-context-protocol#remote-development

First, clone this repository locally:

git clone https://github.com/milatechtransfer/paperpal

Add this to the root of the project in a .cursor/mcp.json file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "paperpal": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": [
        "--directory",
        "/Users/<username>/paperpal/paperpal",
        "run",
        "mcp_server.py"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Development

Use the mcp dev tools to inspect the server:

uv run mcp dev mcp_server.py