Ask a general-purpose assistant about your field and it answers from memory โ sometimes right, sometimes a fluent citation to a paper that was never written. Folio's MCP connector fixes that for your own research: connect Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor or any MCP client to your Folio account, and it stops guessing and starts searching what you actually saved.
Here's how to set it up, and what's actually worth asking it once it's there.
Connect it in about a minute
In Claude: open Settings โ Connectors โ Add custom connector, paste https://www.usefolio.co/api/mcp, and click Connect. Folio opens in your browser, shows you exactly what the connector is asking to do, and you sign in and approve it โ no key to copy, no config file to edit.
Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor and VS Code each take a slightly different path (Claude Code is one terminal command; Cursor and VS Code have one-click buttons in Account โ Connect an AI assistant), and the setup guide walks through every one of them.
It's opt-in, off until you connect something, and free on every plan.
What you're actually giving it access to
Folio shows you all four before anything connects, and you can untick the one that lets it save anything โ search, drafts and survey results are read-only and always included if the connecting app asks for them:
- Search and cite your library โ always on.
- Save and organize sources โ it can add papers, tag them, file them into collections, and leave a note marked as its own. It can never delete anything.
- Read your drafts โ plain text, the authorship record, the Reviewer Report.
- Read your survey results โ per-question summaries, never a participant's identity or a raw answer.
There's no permission that lets it write into a draft, because that tool doesn't exist. It can find sources, check them, and hand you what it found. The writing stays yours.
Six things worth asking it
1. "What does my library say about [your actual research question]?" This is the point of connecting it in the first place: instead of a general answer pulled from training data, you get one grounded in the sources you actually saved, with a citation Folio formats on the spot.
2. "Check this reference list for me." Paste a bibliography โ one Claude just wrote, or one you're not sure about โ and ask it to verify each entry. Folio checks every line against CrossRef, OpenAlex and OpenLibrary and comes back with a verdict: verified, retracted, not found, or couldn't check. "Not found" means an index didn't have a record, not that the paper is fake โ worth remembering before you accuse a real source of not existing.
3. "Does [Author, Year] actually say that?" If a source has full text stored in Folio, the connector checks a quotation against it directly and tells you whether the wording matches, is close but not exact, or isn't there at all.
4. "What in this draft doesn't have a citation?" Point it at a draft you've allowed it to read, and it lists the sentences that make a factual claim with nothing backing them up โ plus which of your library sources could actually support each one. It's read-only: it tells you where the gaps are, it doesn't fill them in.
5. "What's new on my Radar since last week?" If you're running Radar subscriptions or Discovery Agents, ask the connector to pull what's new โ live from the indexes, deduplicated, and flagged for what you already have in your library.
6. "Is this citation retracted?" Give it a DOI or a title and it checks the record and reports retraction status, so a reference the assistant found outside your library still gets checked before you rely on it.
What it won't do
It won't write your introduction, it won't invent a synthesis you haven't actually thought through, and it can't reach anyone else's library โ a connection resolves to exactly one account. Use it to find, verify and follow the field. Write the paper yourself.
The MCP connector is free on every Folio plan. Set it up or read more about what it does.