Semantic Scholar MCP Server

An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server for the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph API — 200M+ papers with citation networks, author profiles, and full-text snippet search.

Built with the MCP TypeScript SDK and Zod.

Tools (16 total)

Papers (9 tools)

Authors (4 tools)

Recommendations (2 tools)

Snippets (1 tool)

Setup

1. Get an API key (optional but recommended)

Get a free key at semanticscholar.org/product/api. Without a key, requests are heavily rate-limited.

2. Install and build

cd semanticscholar-mcp-server
npm install
npm run build

3. Add to Claude Desktop

Add this to your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "semantic-scholar": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/path/to/semanticscholar-mcp-server/dist/index.js"],
      "env": {
        "SEMANTICSCHOLAR_API_KEY": "your-api-key"
      }
    }
  }
}

Or if using Claude Code CLI:

claude mcp add semantic-scholar \
  node \
  /path/to/semanticscholar-mcp-server/dist/index.js \
  -e SEMANTICSCHOLAR_API_KEY=your-api-key

Features

• Multiple ID formats: Accepts S2 Paper IDs, DOIs, ArXiv IDs, PMIDs, PMCIDs, CorpusIds
• Markdown or JSON output: Every tool supports response_format: "json" for structured data
• Custom field selection: Override default fields with the fields parameter
• Built-in rate limiting: Token bucket limiter prevents API throttling
• Batch operations: Retrieve up to 500 papers or 1000 authors in a single call

Usage examples

• "Search Semantic Scholar for papers on transformer architectures from 2023"
• "Get recommendations for papers similar to this one"
• "Find the citation network for DOI 10.1038/nature14539"
• "Search for text snippets mentioning 'chain of thought prompting'"
• "Look up author profile for researcher 1741101"

License

MIT