Spent some time installing and playing Claude desktop + MCP servers like OpenAlex, semantic scholar, Zotero etc and I am starting to see why it might be worth it.

Off the shelf AI literature review systems like Consensus can do all of this, (including connect to Zotero) & covers roughly the same items in the index, but the the main difference is what I blogged about at

Consensus & its peers are running fixed flows, you can't suddenly ask arbitary tasks, e.g look at Openalex, find all papers citing papers you wrote from 2023- and list all citing papers. You can with claude + Openalex mcp. You can combine tools in any order you want, do a search using Openalex, check against Zotero library and list those that are new etc.