MCP 服务器

Semantic Scholar MCP Server

Enables searching academic papers, exploring citation graphs, and looking up authors from Semantic Scholar's database of 200M+ papers.

README

Semantic Scholar MCP Server

An MCP server that gives Claude access to Semantic Scholar's database of 200M+ academic papers. Search papers, explore citation graphs, and look up authors — directly from Claude. Wraps the official semanticscholar SDK with a process-wide rate limiter to prevent 429s under concurrent dispatch.

Tools

Tool	Description
`search_papers`	Keyword search with filters for year range, fields of study, and open-access availability
`get_paper`	Get full details for a paper by Semantic Scholar ID, DOI, ArXiv ID, or PubMed ID
`get_citations`	Navigate the citation graph — find papers that cite a given paper, or papers it references
`get_author`	Look up an author's profile, h-index, and publication metrics
`search_by_author`	Find an author by name and list their top papers

Setup

Prerequisites

Python 3.11+
uv (recommended) or pip
A Semantic Scholar API key (see below — strongly recommended)

Get an API key

Without a key, requests share a global anonymous rate-limit bucket and you will see frequent 429 Too Many Requests errors during normal use. Request a free key at semanticscholar.org/product/api — turnaround is usually a few days.

Once you have a key, set it as an environment variable:

export S2_API_KEY=your_key_here

For persistence across shells, add the line to ~/.zshenv (or your shell's equivalent).

Install

git clone https://github.com/xiuyechen/semantic-scholar-mcp.git
cd semantic-scholar-mcp
uv pip install -e .

Or with pip:

pip install -e .

Rate limiting and retries

The client wraps the official semanticscholar Python SDK and adds a process-wide async token bucket on top. Concurrent calls from the same process serialize through a 1.05s floor so the client cannot burst past the API's 1 req/sec limit, even when an LLM dispatches multiple tools in parallel. Transient 429s are retried with Retry-After-aware exponential backoff (up to 5 attempts). No tuning required.

Configure with Claude

Claude Code

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

Or with an API key:

claude mcp add semantic-scholar -e S2_API_KEY=your_key -- semantic-scholar-mcp

Claude Desktop

Add to your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "semantic-scholar": {
      "command": "semantic-scholar-mcp",
      "env": {
        "S2_API_KEY": "your_key_here"
      }
    }
  }
}