Claude Researcher

Claude, with a memory for your research.

If you use Claude for research, you know the frustration: every new chat is a blank slate. The paper you discussed last week, the framing you settled on, the half-formed idea you wanted to revisit — gone. Claude Researcher is a free toolkit that gives Claude a persistent record of your work, so each session picks up where the last one left off.

It runs entirely in your browser. Nothing installs on your machine, and your work lives in private accounts you own — we never see any of it.

Want to understand it first?

Copy this into any Claude chat. Claude will read the project's public source and explain it — including the caveats. Ask it anything. 

I'm a researcher considering a toolkit called claude_researcher. It says it turns Claude into a research collaborator with persistent memory. Before I decide, please read its public source and explain it to me.

Fetch these files:
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/danparshall/claude_researcher/main/README.md
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/danparshall/claude_researcher/main/HUMANS.md

You may inspect anything else in https://github.com/danparshall/claude_researcher — nothing is hidden.

In plain language: What does it do? What will it ask me to set up? (I understand there's a GitHub access token and a network-access setting.) Where does my data live, and who can see it? What are the real risks and downsides? Be candid — I'd rather hear the caveats now than after setup.

Ready to begin?

Copy this into a fresh Claude chat. Claude walks you through a one-time setup — about 10 minutes — and asks before doing anything sensitive. 

I'd like to set up the claude_researcher workflow (https://github.com/danparshall/claude_researcher).

Fetch https://raw.githubusercontent.com/danparshall/claude_researcher/main/README.md and find the "Quick start" section. It contains a setup prompt inside a code block. Follow that prompt exactly, as if I had pasted it here myself. It walks us through a one-time setup of about 10 minutes, with confirmation gates before anything sensitive.

You'll need a Claude Pro or Team account and a free GitHub account. Never used GitHub? That's fine — the setup assumes nothing.

What is this, really?

Claude Researcher adds persistent memory to your claude.ai research sessions: a durable record of your projects, the papers you've read, the conversations you've had, and the reasoning that came out of them. The record lives in a private repository on GitHub — think of it as a version-controlled lab notebook that both you and Claude can read and write.

It was built for researchers whose work machines are locked down — no admin rights, no installing developer tools. Everything here runs through the browser: claude.ai on one side, GitHub on the other.

What a session feels like

Suppose you work on coastal adaptation policy. You open claude.ai and start a new chat: "Let's pick up the managed-retreat work." Claude reads your profile and your project's status file, then picks up where you left off: "Last time we ended on the tension between federal buyout efficiency and state-level political feasibility. Did you find the GAO report?"

You paste in a PDF; Claude files it, extracts the text, and indexes a summary against your reading notes. You discuss for an hour. You say "good stopping point," and Claude writes a permanent record of the conversation, updates the status log, and notes what's open for next time. Next week, in a fresh chat, everything is still there.

And the record is cross-linked as it's written: your project's STATUS.md points into a running RESEARCH_LOG.md, which points to each session's conversation summary. Months later, it's easy to reconstruct why you made a decision — and easy to find the original conversation, if you ever need it.

How it works

Three pieces, all in plain sight:

Setup involves exactly two configuration screens, and Claude walks you through both:

claude.ai Settings, Capabilities pane — the 'Allow network egress' toggle turned on, with the domain allowlist set
1. Allowing network access in claude.ai settings — this is what lets Claude reach GitHub from inside its sandbox.
GitHub fine-grained personal access token page showing repository permissions being configured
2. Creating the GitHub access token — the setup walks you through the exact permissions, screen by screen.

Is my data private?

Yes. Your repositories are private to your GitHub account. The token that grants access exists only in your claude.ai Project settings, and you can revoke it from GitHub at any time. Nothing about this project routes your data through us — there is no server of ours, no analytics, no account with us at all. We literally could not read your work if we wanted to.

And the flip side of that coin: all of the guidelines about how this framework functions are open-source, so you can tell exactly what instructions Claude is getting. The workflow files, the setup script, the skills — all of it sits in the open at github.com/danparshall/claude_researcher. The explainer prompt at the top of this page exists precisely so Claude itself can audit the project for you before you commit to anything.

Who's behind this

Claude Researcher is a collaboration between Dan Parshall (physicist-turned-data-scientist, now working on AI policy at the Canary Institute) and Andrea Lopez-Luzuriaga (economist). It grew out of our own research workflows, and we share it in the hope it's useful to yours.

The project is open source under the Apache 2.0 license. The full source, design notes, and development history are public in the GitHub repository. Found a problem? Ask Claude in any session to file an issue — or open one yourself.

Requirements