Semantic Scholar MCP Server

Access millions of academic papers from Semantic Scholar using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Works with Claude Code, Claude Desktop, and other MCP-compatible editors.

Features

✅ 33 comprehensive tools - Search papers, analyze citations, manage research
✅ Smart AI prompts - Literature reviews and citation analysis
✅ Project & memory management - Organize your research workflow
✅ Fast & reliable - Built-in caching and error recovery
✅ Free to use - No API key required (optional for higher limits)

Installation

One command (recommended):

claude mcp add semantic-scholar -- uvx semantic-scholar-mcp

Manual setup (add to MCP settings):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "semantic-scholar": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["semantic-scholar-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

With API key (for higher rate limits):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "semantic-scholar": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["semantic-scholar-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "SEMANTIC_SCHOLAR_API_KEY": "your-api-key-here"
      }
    }
  }
}

Get your free API key at: https://www.semanticscholar.org/product/api

Quick Start

Ask in natural language:

"Find recent papers on transformer architectures"
"Show me details for paper DOI 10.1038/nature14539"
"Get recommendations based on the BERT paper"
"Create a literature review on quantum computing"
"Save this review to memory as 'quantum_survey'"

What You Can Do

📄 Paper Research

• Search papers with advanced filters (year, citations, fields)
• Get full details: abstracts, authors, citations, references
• Convert PDFs to Markdown for analysis
• Find related papers with AI recommendations

👤 Author Analysis

• Search researchers by name or field
• Get author profiles with h-index and metrics
• List all publications by author
• Batch operations for multiple authors

🧠 Smart Features

• AI-powered paper recommendations
• Semantic search with SPECTER embeddings
• Citation network analysis
• Research trend identification

💾 Research Organization

• Create multiple research projects
• Save literature reviews and notes
• Manage research memories
• Switch between project contexts

📊 Datasets

• Access Semantic Scholar datasets
• Download paper/author data
• Get incremental updates

License

MIT License - see LICENSE for details.

⚠️ The get_paper_fulltext tool uses PyMuPDF4LLM (AGPL licensed). Commercial usage may require a commercial PyMuPDF license.

Acknowledgments

• Semantic Scholar for the academic graph API
• Anthropic for the MCP specification
• The academic community for making research accessible

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Built for researchers worldwide 🌍