# Welcome to Lune

Lune connects the AI app you already use to research knowledge and tools built
for scientific workflows. Ask a question in plain English and the agent can
retrieve relevant papers from top-tier academic conferences instead of
answering from memory alone.

Paper results include abstracts, authors, venue and publication metadata,
citation relationships, and stable source links. Full text is available for
the agent to parse when Lune has permission to index it. Lune also provides
curated guidance for literature reviews, evaluation design, ablation studies,
research writing, peer review, and venue selection.

## What Lune adds to an agent

- **Research retrieval.** Find foundational work, recent results, related
  papers, and evidence for a specific claim.
- **Source inspection.** Read abstracts and metadata for every indexed paper,
  then inspect source passages when full text is available.
- **Citation context.** Follow what a paper cites and what later work cites it.
- **Scientific workflow guidance.** Retrieve practical guidance for planning,
  evaluating, writing, and submitting research.

## Three ways to use Lune

- **As a hosted miniapp.** Open [Lune Miniapps](https://luneresearch.com/docs/miniapps) at
  [luneresearch.com](https://luneresearch.com) and start asking research
  questions right away. No setup, no key to paste.
- **Inside a web chatbot.** Add the Lune connector or plugin in ChatGPT,
  Claude, Grok, and other web apps. Many sign you in once through the browser;
  others ask for an access key.
- **Inside a local agent.** Add the Lune MCP server to Claude Code, Cursor,
  VS Code, Codex, and other MCP clients. The optional command line app can
  configure the connection for you.

## Where to go next

- [Set up in five minutes](https://luneresearch.com/docs/quickstart): a ground-up walkthrough from
  signing up to your first paper search.
- [Connect Lune to your AI app](https://luneresearch.com/docs/mcp): pick the app you use, or get the
  server URL and OAuth details for a connector.
- [Developer resources](https://luneresearch.com/developers): find the supported connectors, MCP
  setup, command line app, and machine-readable files.
- [Plans, requests & credits](https://luneresearch.com/docs/concepts/quotas-and-billing): what
  counts as a request, how the daily allowance works, when credits kick in.

## A note on language

The docs use "request" for the unit Lune bills: one tool call, or one item of
a batch tool. "Credits" cover extra requests after the daily allowance runs
out. An "access key" is a
secret that starts with `lune_`, for apps and local setups that can't sign you
in through the browser. Apps that can sign you in use OAuth instead.