Creating another MCP server, but this one is for research - While in the lab
In the weeks following my last blog post, I had a niggling feeling that I could apply an MCP server to my literature review. This post is my first run at exploring that. During my grad degree, it has been one of the hardest aspects I’ve had to learn: How do you take papers and distill them down to a supporting argument, a newfound gap, or evidence that something you want to build has a high chance of working? It’s initially really time consumptive, and to my surprise, isn’t a uniform process for labs and researchers. For me I have a massive Google sheet with a tab for each area I’m investigating, a column for each aspect I want to explore in that area, and a row for each paper I’ve found. With some starter papers in hand I’ll review the papers it cites (backwards pass) and the papers that cite it (forward pass) and add new papers to the spreadsheet based on relevance to the area. Another student I know tries to follow something similar to a PRISMA approach by reviewing a conference at a time, screening papers, and including works in their manuscript based on eligibility. Another student frantically searches keywords on Google Scholar right before the deadline (this is ill-advised).