Semantic Scholar MCP Server

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

| Flag | Default | Description | |------|---------|-------------| | --transport | streamable-http | streamable-http or stdio | | --port | 8000 | Port for HTTP transport | | --ngrok | off | Open an ngrok tunnel |