Connect your library to an AI assistant

Ask a general-purpose AI assistant about the literature in your field and it answers from memory. Sometimes that memory is right. Sometimes it invents a plausible paper with a plausible DOI, and you find out during peer review.

Folio's MCP connector closes that gap for your own work. You give an assistant a read-only key to your library, and it can search what you have actually saved and quote citations Folio formats for it. Nothing is invented, because nothing is recalled — every answer traces back to a source you put there yourself.

This is an opt-in, technical feature. It costs nothing and it is off until you create a key.

What the assistant can and cannot do

It gets exactly two read-only tools:

It cannot write, edit, delete, or add anything. It cannot see your documents, your drafts, your certificates, or your account. It cannot reach anyone else's library — a key resolves to exactly one account, and a source id belonging to another researcher is indistinguishable from one that does not exist.

Create a key

1. Open Account → Account in Folio.
2. Under Connect an AI assistant, choose New key.
3. Copy the key immediately. It looks like folio_mcp_… and it is shown once.

Folio stores a hash of the key, not the key. That means we cannot show it to you again, and it also means a copy of our database is not a copy of your access. If you lose a key, revoke it and make another.

Treat a key like a password: anyone holding it can read your library.

Connect Claude

Claude Desktop reads a JSON config file (Settings → Developer → Edit Config). Add Folio as a remote server:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "folio": {
      "url": "https://usefolio.co/api/mcp",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer folio_mcp_your_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude. Folio's two tools appear in the tools list, and asking something like "what does my library say about retrieval practice?" will make it search rather than guess.

Connect anything else

The endpoint is a standard MCP server over Streamable HTTP, so any compliant client works the same way:

• Endpoint: https://usefolio.co/api/mcp
• Transport: HTTP POST, JSON-RPC 2.0
• Auth: Authorization: Bearer <your key>

There is no SSE stream to subscribe to — the server has nothing to push — so clients that require one should be configured for request/response only.

To check a key from a terminal:

curl -s https://usefolio.co/api/mcp \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer folio_mcp_your_key_here" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/list"}'

A valid key lists the two tools. An invalid or revoked one returns 401.

Revoking

Revoke a key from the same panel in Account → Account. It stops working immediately, and the other keys on your account keep working — which is why it is worth creating a separate key per assistant rather than reusing one everywhere.

A revoked key leaves its record behind, so you can still see when it was created and when it was last used.

Limits and honesty notes

• Searches are metered under the same hourly allowance as semantic search inside Folio. An assistant stuck in a loop will be throttled, not billed to you.
• get_citation returns what Folio holds. If a source's metadata is thin, the reference will be thin — the connector does not fill gaps with guesses, and that is deliberate.
• Retraction status is passed through on every result. If you cite something Folio knows is retracted, the assistant is told so.
• This is version 1: read-only, your library only. Public or cross-library search is not part of it.