Semantic Scholar

Semantic Scholar on xpay — Pay-per-call academic paper search without vendor lock-in

Semantic Scholar is an AI-powered academic search engine that indexes millions of papers, citations, and author profiles. Developers use it to build research tools, citation analysis systems, literature review assistants, and knowledge graphs. Instead of managing a separate Semantic Scholar account and subscription, xpay wraps their API as MCP-callable tools with transparent per-call pricing—no monthly fees, no seat limits.

What's available

• Paper search: papers-search-basic and paper-search-advanced for querying the academic corpus with optional filters (year, venue, author).
• Paper metadata: get-paper-abstract retrieves full details including abstract, citations count, and publication venue for a specific paper ID.
• Title matching: search-paper-title finds papers by closest title match when you don't have an exact ID.
• Citation graph: papers-citations and papers-references traverse incoming and outgoing citations to build citation networks.
• Author lookup: authors-search finds authors by name or affiliation; authors-papers lists all papers by a specific author.
• Batch operations: papers-batch retrieves metadata for multiple papers in one call.
• arXiv integration: search-arxiv queries arXiv directly; download-full-paper-arxiv fetches and extracts full-text PDFs.
• Citation analysis: analysis-citation-network analyzes the citation network structure around a paper.

When Semantic Scholar is the right tool

• Building a literature review assistant that summarizes papers and their citations.
• Creating a research discovery tool that recommends related papers or authors.
• Implementing citation tracking to monitor how a paper is cited over time.
• Extracting metadata at scale for systematic reviews or meta-analyses.
• Analyzing research trends by querying papers across years and venues.
• Building knowledge graphs of academic relationships (authors, papers, citations).
• Automating paper recommendations based on user interests or reading history.

When to choose something else

• If you need full-text search across proprietary journals (paywalled content), Semantic Scholar's coverage is limited; consider institutional access or APIs like CrossRef.
• If your use case is real-time news or web content, use a general search API like Tavily or Perplexity instead.
• If you need author disambiguation at scale with high precision, specialized bibliographic databases (Scopus, Web of Science) may be more reliable.
• If you're building a commercial search product that directly competes with Semantic Scholar, licensing terms may restrict use.
• If you only need DOI resolution or citation formatting, lightweight tools like CrossRef or Zotero may be simpler.

Pricing snapshot

All 12 tools are priced at $0.01 per call. You pay only for what you use; no subscription or minimum.

Quickstart

Step 1: Get your xpay API key

Sign up at https://xpay.tools with email or Google, then copy your API key from the dashboard.

Step 2: Connect Semantic Scholar to Claude Code

claude mcp add --transport http semantic-scholar "https://semantic-scholar.mcp.xpay.sh/mcp?key=YOUR_XPAY_KEY"

Replace YOUR_XPAY_KEY with your actual key.

Step 3: Use it

Once connected, ask Claude to search papers: "Use papers-search-basic to find papers about transformer architectures." Claude will call the tool directly by name and return results.

For Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, or VS Code (Copilot):

Add this entry to your mcp.json file:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "semantic-scholar": {
      "url": "https://semantic-scholar.mcp.xpay.sh/mcp?key=YOUR_XPAY_KEY"
    }
  }
}

Why route Semantic Scholar through xpay?

• No Semantic Scholar account: xpay holds the upstream credentials. You authenticate once with xpay and get instant access to Semantic Scholar's full API.
• Pay only for calls: $0.01 per call, no monthly subscription or seat fees. Search 100 papers for $1; search 10,000 for $100.
• MCP-native: Tools appear as native MCP resources in Claude Code, Cursor, and other MCP-compatible agents. No custom wrappers or SDK integration needed.
• Unified billing: If you use multiple providers (Tavily, Apollo, Perplexity, etc.) through xpay, one invoice covers everything.
• Transparent pricing: See exactly what each call costs before you run it. No hidden charges or rate-limit surprises.