paper-moc

Paper MOC (Map of Content)

Overview

Reads a set of paper notes from the Obsidian vault and generates a single MOC (Map of Content) page: a topic summary + categorized index of all related papers. Uses mcp-obsidian to read existing notes and write the MOC.

Required MCP

MarkusPfundstein/mcp-obsidian must be installed and configured.

Input

Ask user for:

• Topic name (e.g. "Diffusion Models for Medical Imaging")
• Which paper notes to include (folder path, or list of note titles)

Steps

1. Read all specified paper notes via mcp-obsidian
2. Identify 2–4 sub-themes that group the papers (based on method, application area, or chronology)
3. Write a 2–3 paragraph topic overview synthesizing the field
4. Create MOC-{{topic}}.md with the structure below

MOC Template

File path: MOCs/MOC-{{topic-slug}}.md

# MOC: {{topic}}

> {{2–3 paragraph overview of the research area: what problem it addresses, how approaches have evolved, open questions}}

## Sub-themes

### {{Sub-theme 1}}
- [[{{paper-note-title}}]] — {{one-line description}}
- [[{{paper-note-title}}]] — {{one-line description}}

### {{Sub-theme 2}}
- [[{{paper-note-title}}]] — {{one-line description}}

## Chronological View
| Year | Paper | Key Contribution |
|------|-------|-----------------|
| 2017 | [[Attention Is All You Need]] | Introduced transformer architecture |

## Open Questions
- {{unresolved question surfaced across these papers}}

Output

Path of the created MOC file:

MOCs/MOC-diffusion-models-medical-imaging.md

Common Issues

• Too few papers: MOC is most useful with 5+ papers. For fewer, suggest using paper-note only.
• Sub-theme overlap: If papers don't cluster neatly, use chronological grouping instead.