MCP Semantic Scholar Server

🚀 Semantic Scholar API MCP Server

This server is built using mcp-python-sdk.

⚠️ Important Note

If you're still using the FastMCP version of this MCP server, please consider pulling this repository again and updating to the new version, as FastMCP has been deprecated.

🚀 Quick Start

📦 Installation

The installation requires running the following command:

pip install -r requirements.txt

💻 Usage Examples

Basic Usage

Run the following command to initialize the server:

mcp dev path/to/semantic-scholar-plugin.py

Advanced Usage

Run the following command to install it to Claude or add the following content to the Claude/cline configuration:

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

⚠️ Important Note

Currently, using uv and mcp may break some versions of Claude-desktop on Linux/macOS. You may need to set it as follows:

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

Here, /path/to/mcp can be obtained by running the which mcp command.

🔧 Technical Details

API Key

To use the Semantic Scholar API and increase the rate limit, you can set the API key as an environment variable:

export SEMANTIC_SCHOLAR_API_KEY="your_api_key"

Or set it by adding the env key in the MCP settings:

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

You can obtain the API key at the following link: https://www.semanticscholar.org/product/api

Recommended Prompt System Prompt

Refer to benhaotang/my_agent_system_prompt to make full use of the research prefix AI agent of this MCP server.

Known Issues

• If you see log messages like INFO Processing request of type __init__.py:431 ListToolsRequest, you can ignore them as they won't affect the normal operation. This is the result of cline parsing the tool list and displaying it along with console debugging information. Currently, the python-sdk cannot disable console messages. Apart from seeing this warning, it won't affect any functional calls.