What is Semantic Scholar MCP?

It lets AI agents search Semantic Scholar's catalog of 214M+ papers, open paper and author profiles, walk citations and references, and surface recommended reads after you add the server in MCPBundles.

Who is Semantic Scholar MCP for?

Researchers and review leads who need paper discovery, citation context, author lookup, and reading-list expansion without leaving their AI chat.

Can an agent map citations from chat?

Yes. Open a paper, then list papers that cite it or papers it references to trace influence, find seminal work, or build a structured review outline.

Add the server in MCPBundles and start searching. Optional free access from Semantic Scholar improves rate limits for sustained literature review sessions.

How do I connect Semantic Scholar to my AI agent?

Add the MCPBundles server URL to your MCP client configuration (Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code, etc.). The URL format is: https://mcp.mcpbundles.com/bundle/semantic-scholar. Authentication is handled automatically.

How many tools does Semantic Scholar provide?

Semantic Scholar provides 14 tools that can be called by AI agents, along with a SKILL.md that gives your AI agent domain knowledge about when and how to use them.

What authentication does Semantic Scholar require?

Semantic Scholar uses open data APIs — no authentication required.

Semantic Scholar MCP Server

Tools discovered (14)

Batch Authors
Fetch Semantic Scholar details for multiple authors in a single request (up to 1000 IDs). Returns name, affiliations, paper count, citation count, and h-index for each author.
Batch Papers
Fetch Semantic Scholar details for multiple papers in a single request (up to 500 IDs). Returns title, abstract, authors, citation count, venue, and more for each paper. More efficient than repeated one-paper lookups when you already have many ids.
Get Author
Fetch detailed Semantic Scholar author profile including name, affiliations, homepage, paper count, citation count, h-index, and external IDs (DBLP, etc.).
Get Author Papers
Get a Semantic Scholar author's papers with title, year, venue, citation count, and co-author information. Paginated for authors with many publications.
Get Citations
Get Semantic Scholar papers that cite a given paper (incoming citations). Returns citing papers with context snippets, citation intents, and whether the citation is influential.
Get Paper
Fetch full Semantic Scholar paper metadata including abstract, authors, citation/reference counts, fields of study, and publication details. Accepts paperId, DOI:, ARXIV:, CorpusID:, or URL.
Get Paper Authors
Get the authors of a Semantic Scholar paper with their affiliations, publication count, citation count, and h-index.
Get References
Get Semantic Scholar papers referenced by a given paper (bibliography/outgoing references). Returns referenced papers with context snippets, citation intents, and whether the reference is influential.
Match Paper
Find a single Semantic Scholar paper by exact or close title match. Returns the best-matching paper with a match score. Use this when you know the paper title and want to resolve it to a paperId.
Recommend Papers
Get paper recommendations based on lists of positive (and optionally negative) example papers (Semantic Scholar Recommendations API). Provide papers you want more like and optionally papers you want less like.
Search Authors
Search Semantic Scholar for authors by name. Returns authors with their affiliations, paper count, citation count, and h-index.
Search Papers
Search Semantic Scholar papers by relevance (Academic Graph API). Returns papers with title, abstract, TLDR summary, authors, venue, citation count, and more. Supports filters for year, field of study, citation count, open access, publication type, and venue. Shared API key is rate-limited; add a personal Semantic Scholar key in credentials for heavy search.
Search Snippets
Search for text snippets (~500 words) across academic papers that match a query. Returns ranked text excerpts from titles, abstracts, and body text with the source paper's corpusId, title, authors, and access info. To hydrate full metadata from a snippet, look up the source paper by id (for example CorpusID:<corpusId> from the snippet payload). Great for finding specific claims, methods, or results within papers.
Similar Papers
Get paper recommendations similar to a single input paper (Semantic Scholar Recommendations API). Choose from 'recent' papers across all fields or 'all-cs' for all computer science papers.

Semantic Scholar

What you can do with Semantic Scholar

Example workflows

Setup Instructions

Try Semantic Scholar now

Use in your AI tool

Use the tools from this page

Connect the MCP server

Chat in MCPBundles Studio

Context to know first

AI Skill
SKILL.md