Turn a research question into a brief built from real papers, a current encyclopedia entry and published statistics, each one linked back to where it came from. Once the Firecrawl connector is added, Claude can query Firecrawl Alexandria for Firecrawl Research Index papers, Wikipedia entries and World Bank indicators.
Best for
- Graduate students using Claude for academic research who want every item on a reading list to carry a checkable identifier.
- Consultants and analysts writing a background section they will have to defend.
- Journalists confirming a number before it goes into a story.
Connector and data providers
Connector: the Firecrawl connector. Once it's on, web search, page scraping and Firecrawl Alexandria tools all become available in your chats, and anything with a price is billed to your connected Firecrawl team.
Data providers in Firecrawl Alexandria
| Provider | Tool | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Firecrawl Research Index | Search papers | Papers ranked against your question, each with title, abstract and identifiers like a DOI, PMID or PMCID. Narrow by author, subject category or dates. |
| Firecrawl Research Index | Read paper passages | The parts of one indexed paper that speak to a question you pose. |
| Firecrawl Research Index | Find related papers | Work similar to a seed paper, the papers citing it, or its reference list. |
| Wikipedia | Structured article | Today's version of an article, looked up by exact title and split into abstract, infobox, sections and references via Wikimedia Enterprise. |
| World Bank | Data | Values for an indicator by country and year, returned with the indicator's official name. |
| PubMed and PMC | Search | Records that match a PubMed query, carrying PMID, DOI, journal and publication date. |
Explore Firecrawl Alexandria data providers across categories
Starter prompt
Change the subject and the countries, then send it:
Use Firecrawl to research how remote work affects employee productivity.
Work through Firecrawl Alexandria and list what each tool costs before
you run it.
Return a brief in three parts:
- Context: three sentences from the Wikipedia article "Remote work",
plus the date it was last edited.
- Studies: six papers published since January 2025 from the Firecrawl
Research Index, with DOI or PMID and a one-line finding each.
- Data: a World Bank indicator on the workforce for two countries I'll
name, each value with its year.
Cite only what the tools returned and tell me where you came up short.Before you start
- Connect Firecrawl. Open the Firecrawl connector and pick Connect. In the Firecrawl window that opens, log in or open a free account, select the paying team and approve. The whole flow happens in the browser, without API keys or MCP configuration, and Firecrawl in Claude walks through it with screenshots.
- Switch it on in your chat. In a conversation, open the + menu, go to Connectors and enable Firecrawl.
- Know which calls cost credits. Firecrawl Research Index searches are free, and Wikipedia, World Bank and PubMed lookups take a few credits each. A small number of catalog providers only run on paid plans.
In Claude, go to Customize → Connectors, pick Firecrawl, and under Tool permissions set the Read-only tools group to Always allow, so Claude can run lookups without asking each time. Some of those lookups use Firecrawl credits, so keep confirmation on if you'd rather approve each paid call yourself.
Limitations of using Claude for research without Firecrawl
Is Claude good for research without tools? It has four weak spots, and all of them come back to sources.
- References that may not hold up. Anthropic's support page admits that Claude sometimes answers incorrectly or in misleading ways, that quotes which look authoritative may not be grounded in fact, and that you should check the sources it cites (Anthropic). Studies of language models show how often this happens with references: in a Cureus analysis of AI-written medical papers, 47% of 115 citations were fabricated (Cureus).
- Missing studies. Asked to rebuild the reference lists of 11 systematic reviews, the best model tested in a JMIR study recovered under 14% of the relevant papers (JMIR). The authors conclude that references from these models need thorough validation.
- A knowledge cutoff. Each Claude model stops learning at a cutoff date, and Anthropic says it may not know about, or have accurate information on, events after that (Anthropic). A paper published this spring won't be part of what Claude recalls.
- Web search helps, with caveats. Web search lets Claude cite live pages, but Anthropic notes that links occasionally don't work and that Team or Enterprise owners need to enable it before anyone else can search (Anthropic). A general web search also won't tell you whether a page is a peer-reviewed paper.
How Claude sources papers and dated facts with Firecrawl
Four parts work together when Claude researches with Firecrawl:
- Firecrawl Alexandria: where agents get sourced data. It holds over 100 official providers, licensed and paid for, next to indexes Firecrawl runs over the web, scientific papers, developer docs and government records. Firecrawl compared agents across 845 tasks, keeping the model and prompts the same and having an AI judge grade answers blind, and agents using Firecrawl Alexandria came out 21% ahead of those on default web tools.
- Papers you can open: Firecrawl Research Index results carry DOIs, PMIDs or arXiv IDs. A search we ran for remote work and productivity papers since 2025 brought back studies from PLOS One and Ergonomics, each with a DOI.
- Facts with a date attached: the Wikipedia tool returns the current revision with its edit time, and World Bank values arrive labeled by country, year and indicator. India's female labor force participation came back as 32.4% for 2025, marked as a modeled ILO estimate.
- Prices up front: Claude can list tools and costs before it runs anything, and Firecrawl Research Index lookups don't cost credits.
Researching in Claude with and without Firecrawl Alexandria
| Claude by itself | Claude with Firecrawl Alexandria | |
|---|---|---|
| Paper list | Recalled from training, sometimes with errors | Records from an index, each carrying an identifier such as a DOI or PMID |
| Newest studies | Ends at the model's knowledge cutoff without web search | Filterable by date, through the current year |
| What a paper says | Depends on whether a page loads | Matching passages read from the indexed paper |
| Numbers | A recollection without a year | World Bank values with country, year and indicator name |
| Topic overview | Paraphrased from memory | The live Wikipedia revision and its edit date |
| Source | Hard to verify | Firecrawl Research Index papers, Wikipedia articles and World Bank series, each part of Firecrawl Alexandria and its 100+ providers. Explore the catalog |
| Going deeper | Run another search | Pull papers that cite, or are cited by, a paper you choose |
Build your own research workflow
Write the request around your field and deadline. For a thesis literature review:
Use Firecrawl to search the Firecrawl Research Index for papers since 2024
on screen time and sleep in teenagers. Give me eight with DOI, journal
and year. After I choose one, find later papers that cite it.For a policy or market brief:
With Firecrawl, summarize the Wikipedia article "Renewable energy" and
then get the most recent World Bank values for renewable energy
consumption as a share of total energy for Brazil, India and Germany,
with the year for each.Naming the source, a date range and the identifiers you want keeps Claude anchored to records rather than recall.
Take it further
Pull the key passage
Use Firecrawl to look up the PLOS One study on experienced teammates in
remote work in the Firecrawl Research Index and quote what it reports about
productivity for new hires.Follow the citations
With Firecrawl, find ten papers that cite the study I just chose, ranked
by relevance to remote work and productivity.Verify a figure before publishing
Use Firecrawl to confirm India's female labor force participation rate
in the World Bank data, with the year and the indicator name.Check a claim against the literature
With Firecrawl, read what the Wikipedia article "Four-day workweek" says
about productivity, then find three recent papers that test it.Price the tools first
Use Firecrawl to list tools that search papers, read Wikipedia or return
World Bank data, with each price. Don't call any of them yet.What it costs
Searching the catalog and looking up prices doesn't cost anything. Credits come off your team's Firecrawl balance only when Claude calls a priced tool, and Firecrawl pricing has the plan details.
| Tool | Good for | Credits per call |
|---|---|---|
| Search papers (Firecrawl Research Index) | Papers matching a question | 0 |
| Read paper passages (Firecrawl Research Index) | One paper's text on a specific point | 0 |
| Find related papers (Firecrawl Research Index) | Citing, cited or similar work | 0 |
| Structured article (Wikipedia) | A sectioned article with references | 1 per article |
| Data (World Bank) | Indicator values for countries and years | 5 |
| Search (PubMed and PMC) | Matching records in PubMed | 5 |
Each answer ends with the name of the tool Claude called and the credits it took.
[ Research in Claude ]
Add Firecrawl to Claude and research from papers that exist. Searching the Firecrawl Research Index costs nothing.
Related use cases
- How to search arXiv and PubMed in Claude: preprints, PubMed field tags and OpenReview peer reviews in detail.
- How to find papers that cite a study in Claude: see which later research builds on a paper.
- How to use Claude at work: company, competitor and vendor research with other providers.
Coverage limits
- Only what's indexed. The Firecrawl Research Index is mostly abstracts plus arXiv papers, and a passage read that comes back empty doesn't mean the paper never discusses your question.
- Exact Wikipedia titles. Articles are fetched by their exact title, so a misspelled or approximate title returns nothing.
- Some figures are estimates. World Bank series such as ILO-modeled labor data are model outputs, and the indicator name flags them.