Claude Code

Claude Code has two front doors to the same pipeline. The skill is where the rubrics live, so it carries the screening and reranking cognition. The plugin installs that skill and configures the MCP server in one step.

The plugin

The shortest route. It installs the skill and configures the uvx MCP server together.

/plugin marketplace add Synectic-Research/research-scan
/plugin install research-scan@synectic

The marketplace is synectic; the plugin is research-scan@synectic.

The skill on its own

Three equivalent routes, all pointing at the same skills/research-scan/ directory in the main repo.

# 1. symlink a clone — edits to the rubrics take effect immediately
ln -s "$PWD/skills/research-scan" ~/.claude/skills/research-scan

# 2. load the repo as a plugin, per invocation
claude --plugin-dir /path/to/research-scan

# 3. skills CLI
npx skills add Synectic-Research/research-scan

The first route is the one to pick if you intend to change the rubrics. The screening scale, the plan rules and the rerank criteria are plain Markdown files; symlinking a clone means your edits are live on the next scan, and you can diff scores across runs to see what a change actually did.

Using it

/research-scan "what is the strongest recent evidence that default enrolment changes
                how much people save?" --profile quick

Or against a brief:

/research-scan research/my-brief.md --profile standard --top 10

See your first scan for the full argument list and what each brief section feeds.

What the skill needs

The skill declares its own tool requirements, and they matter if you are running with a restricted tool set:

Bash(research-scan *), Read, Write, Edit, Glob, Grep,
scan_start, scan_continue, scan_verify, scan_result

Glob is not optional — the skill globs screen-batches/ to find the batches to score.

The skill also runs in a forked context. That is invisible in interactive use, but it changes how headless invocation has to be phrased; see running it unattended.

The MCP route instead

If you would rather configure the server yourself, or you are also using Claude Desktop or Cursor, .mcp.json in the project root does it:

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

See MCP clients.