alphaXiv

alphaXiv is a platform for discovering, reading and discussing arXiv papers. It connects papers, researchers and organisations and grounds its answers in the underlying work. The home feed lists trending papers with a one-sentence takeaway, contributing institutions, authors, votes and view counts, alongside suggested researchers to follow. It serves researchers who want to track what is worth reading and who is working on a subject, and developers building AI agents that need research access.

Beyond the browser app, alphaXiv runs a Model Context Protocol server at api.alphaxiv.org that gives AI applications, agents and workflows programmatic access to the corpus. The server uses streamable HTTP and advertises OAuth 2.1, so an MCP client opens a browser sign-in on first use; scripts and headless agents can instead send an API key as a bearer token. Native clients such as Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code and Zed are supported.

The server exposes 21 tools in three groups. Research tools read the For You and Hot feeds, run discover_papers, an agentic retrieval loop combining keyword and embedding search that returns 5 to 15 ranked papers, fetch a paper as an AI-generated report or full text, return the PDF pages relevant to a set of queries so citations can be built, and read files from a paper's GitHub repository. Researcher tools find people by subject, organisation, career history or coauthorship.

Feed retrieval makes no model calls and does not count against the assistant quota, while search and analysis tools do. Browser-hosted MCP integrations inside claude.ai or chatgpt.com are not supported because CORS is restricted to first-party origins; a local bridge such as mcp-remote is needed for browser-based assistants. Researchers can sign up, publish, follow authors and claim their own profile, and library management is also available through the MCP tools.

Use cases

• Literature discovery and related-work searches
• Exploring a paper's codebase and managing a reading library
• Finding who works on a subject or an organisation's roster
• Building citations from the relevant pages of a PDF
• Keeping up with trending research