MCP Server - priorwork.fyi

🔌 What is this?

priorwork-mcp is a small Model Context Protocol server that puts semantic search over 128,700+ papers from major ML, NLP, and Computer Vision conferences (NeurIPS, CVPR, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, ICCV, AISTATS, and more) directly into your agent's tool list — no browser tab, no copy-pasting abstracts. Ask your agent to find prior work on an idea and it calls the tool itself.

⚡ Quick Start

One command, no API key required to start — it defaults to a shared public key.

# Claude Code
claude mcp add priorwork -- uvx priorwork-mcp

For Cursor or any other MCP client, add this to your MCP configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "priorwork": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["priorwork-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Runs via uvx, so the only prerequisite is uv — nothing to install or keep updated yourself.

🧰 Tools

Tool	Description
`search_papers`	Semantic search from a natural-language query — returns ranked papers with authors, venue, year, similarity score, download URL, and full abstract. Pass `summarize=true` to add a structured per-paper LLM summary (problem, core insight, method, key results, positioning).
`search_by_pdf_url`	Give it a public PDF link (e.g. an arXiv PDF) and get semantically similar papers from the index.
`list_indexes`	List the available paper indexes and their sizes.

⚙️ Configuration

Everything is optional — configured via environment variables, passed with -e KEY=value in claude mcp add, or an "env" block in JSON configs.

Variable	Required	Description
`PRIORWORK_API_KEY`	optional	Your own key from below. Defaults to the shared public free-tier key, rate-limited across every default install.
`PRIORWORK_API_URL`	optional	Override the API base URL. Defaults to `https://priorwork.fyi`.

Public Free Key (default)

pw_live_65d65b6a1f42920fda777e306f0005c0b9141bba4327dff203be010c1f34be72

The shared key is capped at 500 requests/day in total across everyone using the default install, so if you're hitting limits, set PRIORWORK_API_KEY to a key of your own — see the API docs for the same key, unlimited for your own use.

# Claude Code, with your own key
claude mcp add priorwork -e PRIORWORK_API_KEY=your_key_here -- uvx priorwork-mcp

💬 Example

"Find prior work on spatiotemporal forecasting with graph neural networks"

1. Taming Local Effects in Graph-based Spatiotemporal Forecasting — Andrea Cini, et al. (2023 · NeurIPS) [score: 0.802] 2. FourierGNN: Rethinking Multivariate Time Series Forecasting from a Pure Graph Perspective — ...

This is exactly the check worth running before starting new work, or before a submission — a topic can rack up over a thousand papers in a single year (see the paper timelapse), more than any one person can track by hand.