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