Semantic Scholar MCP Server

An MCP server that provides access to the Semantic Scholar academic paper API, with optional ngrok tunnel for remote access.

Features

• search_papers — Search for papers by keyword, year, field of study, and citation count

• get_paper — Get full details for a paper by S2 ID, DOI, ArXiv ID, etc.

• get_citations — List papers that cite a given paper

• get_references — List papers referenced by a given paper

• search_authors — Search for authors by name

• get_author — Get author profile (h-index, paper count, affiliations)

• get_author_papers — List papers by a specific author

• recommend_papers — Get paper recommendations based on a seed paper

• batch_get_papers — Look up multiple papers in a single request

Setup

Requires Python 3.10+ and uv.

# Install dependencies
uv sync

Optionally set an API key for higher rate limits:

export S2_API_KEY="your-key-here"

Usage

HTTP transport (default) — for remote clients

uv run python server.py

The server listens on http://localhost:8000. The MCP endpoint is at /mcp.

With ngrok tunnel

uv run python server.py --ngrok

This opens a public ngrok tunnel and prints the URL to stderr.

stdio transport — for Claude Desktop

uv run python server.py --transport stdio

Claude Desktop config (claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "semantic-scholar": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": ["--directory", "/path/to/this/project", "run", "python", "server.py", "--transport", "stdio"]
    }
  }
}

Options