Semantic Scholar API MCP server

Made with mcp-python-sdk

Important

if you are still using FastMCP version of this mcp server, please consider pull this repo again and update to newer versions as FastMCP is already deprecated.

Usage

Requirements: pip install -r requirements.txt

Run mcp dev path/to/semantic-scholar-plugin.py to initialize the server.

Run mcp install path/to/semantic-scholar-plugin.py to install to claude or add following to claude/cline config:

"semantic-scholar": {
      "command": "uv",
      "args": [
        "run",
        "--with",
        "mcp",
        "mcp",
        "run",
        "/path/to/semantic-scholar-plugin.py"
      ]
    }

Note

Currently using uv with mcp seems to break certain Linux/macOS version of Claude-desktop, you might need to set as:

"semantic-scholar": {
      "command": "/path/to/mcp",
      "args": [
        "run",
        "/path/to/semantic-scholar-plugin.py"
      ]
    }

instead, with /path/to/mcp got from running which mcp in terminal

API Key

To use the Semantic Scholar API with higher rate limits, you can set your API key as an environment variable:

export SEMANTIC_SCHOLAR_API_KEY="your_api_key"

or set by adding an env key in mcp settings by:

"semantic-scholar": {
      "command": ...,
      "args": ...,
      "env": {
        "SEMANTIC_SCHOLAR_API_KEY": "your_api_key"
      }
}

You can get an API key by filling out the form at: https://www.semanticscholar.org/product/api

Suggested Agent System prompt

See: benhaotang/my_agent_system_prompt, the AI pre-research agent that can make full use of this mcp server.

Known issues

• If you see things like INFO Processing request of type __init__.py:431 ListToolsRequest in cline, you can ignore them as this will not affect it from working, this is because cline parse tool list together with console debug infos, and current python-sdk cannot disable console messages. This will not affect any function calling part other than seeing this warning.