semantic-scholar

name

semantic-scholar

description

How to use the semantic-scholar MCP tools for academic paper lookup, citation tracing, author profiling, and paper recommendations. Use this skill whenever the user asks about academic papers, citations, references, author h-index, paper metadata, or wants to search the academic literature — even if they don't mention "Semantic Scholar" by name. Also use it when you need to look up a paper by arXiv ID, DOI, or title.

Semantic Scholar MCP Tools

This skill covers the 8 tools provided by the semantic-scholar MCP server. These tools give you access to 200M+ academic papers via the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph API.

Important: these tools return metadata only — title, abstract, authors, year, citation counts, and paper IDs. They do not return full paper text. If the user needs to read a paper's methodology, results, or analysis in detail, you'll need a separate full-text tool (like alphaxiv).

Tools at a Glance

Tool	What it does	When to use
paper	Single paper metadata	You have a paper ID and need its details
paperBatch	Up to 500 papers at once	You have multiple IDs to look up
relevanceSearch	Keyword search with filters	Finding papers on a topic
citations	Papers that cite a given paper	Tracing forward influence
references	Papers cited by a given paper	Tracing backward lineage
recommendations	Similar papers from seed papers	Discovering related work
author	Author profile	Getting h-index, paper count, affiliations
authorPapers	Author's publication list	Browsing someone's body of work

Paper ID Formats

All tools that accept a paper_id understand these formats:

Format	Example	Notes
ARXIV (prefixed)	ARXIV:1706.03762	Most reliable for arXiv papers
ARXIV (bare)	2005.14165	Auto-prefixed — works the same
DOI (prefixed)	DOI:10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2	For journal papers
DOI (bare)	10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2	Auto-prefixed
S2 ID	204e3073870fae3d05bcbc2f6a8e263d9b72e776	Semantic Scholar's internal hex ID
PMID	PMID:34265844	PubMed papers
URL	URL:https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762	Any paper URL

When the user gives you an arXiv link like https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12345, extract the ID and use ARXIV:2301.12345.

Tool Details

relevanceSearch

The go-to tool for finding papers on a topic. Returns ranked results with metadata.

Parameters:

• query (required) — keywords or paper title
• limit — max results (default 10, max 100)
• offset — for pagination
• year — range filter: "2023-2024", "2020-", "-2023"
• fields_of_study — e.g. "Computer Science", "Mathematics", "Physics"
• min_citation_count — integer threshold (useful for finding impactful work)
• open_access_only — boolean, filters to papers with free PDFs

Tips:

• Use specific technical terms rather than broad queries
• Combine year + min_citation_count to find recent high-impact work
• The total field in the response tells you how many papers match overall

paper / paperBatch

Look up known papers by ID. paperBatch is more efficient when you have multiple IDs — it returns null for any ID not found, without failing the whole request.

Returns: title, abstract, year, authors (with IDs), citationCount, influentialCitationCount, referenceCount, externalIds, fieldsOfStudy, venue, publicationDate, openAccessPdf, tldr.

citations / references

Traverse the citation graph. citations gives you papers that cite the target (forward in time). references gives you papers the target cites (backward in time).

Parameters:

• paper_id (required)
• limit — default 100, max 1000
• offset — for pagination through large citation lists

Returns include:

• contexts — the actual sentences where the citation appears
• intents — why it was cited (background, methodology, result)
• isInfluential — whether this is a substantive citation vs. a passing mention

Use offset + limit to page through highly-cited papers (e.g., "Attention Is All You Need" has 175k+ citations).

recommendations

Finds papers similar to your seed papers. Supports steering with negative seeds.

Parameters:

• positive_paper_ids (required) — papers you want more of
• negative_paper_ids (optional) — papers to steer away from
• limit — default 100, max 500

This is powerful for literature discovery when you have a few anchor papers and want to expand. Negative seeds help when recommendations drift into an adjacent but unwanted subfield.

author / authorPapers

Look up researcher profiles and their publications.

• author takes a numeric author ID (found in paper results under authors[].authorId)
• authorPapers returns their publication list with pagination

Common Workflows

Find high-impact recent papers on a topic:

relevanceSearch(query, year="2023-", min_citation_count=50, limit=20)

Get a paper and its most important references:

paper(id) → then references(id, limit=20) → filter by isInfluential=true

Trace how a paper influenced the field:

citations(id, limit=50) → sort by citationCount → look at top citers

Discover related work from anchor papers:

recommendations(positive=[paper_a, paper_b], negative=[unrelated_paper], limit=20)

Profile a researcher:

author(id) → authorPapers(id, limit=50) → sort by citationCount

Things to Keep in Mind

• Rate limits: Without an API key, you get 1 request/second. With a key, 100 req/s. If you're doing batch operations, prefer paperBatch over multiple paper calls.
• Metadata only: These tools don't give you full paper text. Don't summarize a paper based solely on its abstract — tell the user you only have the abstract if that's all you've read.
• Author IDs are numeric: You'll find them in paper results. They're not names — you need the ID to call author or authorPapers.
• Pagination: For citations/references/authorPapers, use offset and limit. The response includes a next field indicating the offset for the next page.
• Null in batch: paperBatch returns null for papers not found — this is normal, not an error.