Arlet
Semantic Scholar

Connect Semantic Scholar to Codex

Query Semantic Scholar directly from Codex. Arlet links the two through one MCP connection and takes care of API keys.

This server connects your AI client to the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph API and Recommendations API operated by the Allen Institute for AI. It covers 200M+ papers, 80M+ authors and 2B+ citation edges across all disciplines, making it a general-purpose literature tool for market research, due diligence and technology scouting as well as academic work.

Key features:

  • search_papers: relevance search with year range, field of study, publication type (Review / MetaAnalysis / ClinicalTrial ...), venue, minimum citation count and open-access filters. Returns citation counts, DOI / arXiv ids, open-access PDF links and a one-sentence TLDR.
  • get_paper: full details by Semantic Scholar id, DOI, arXiv id, PubMed id or Corpus id.
  • get_paper_citations / get_paper_references: who cites a paper and what it cites, with citation intents (background / method / result), influential flags and citing-context snippets.
  • search_authors: researchers by name with affiliations, paper count, total citations and h-index.
  • get_recommendations: related papers for a seed paper from Semantic Scholar's recommendation model.

Licensing: data is returned under the Semantic Scholar API License Agreement (ODC-BY 1.0 / CC BY-NC depending on the record) and every response carries the required 'Semantic Scholar' attribution. Abstract text is included only for open-access papers under a CC-BY family license; for other papers the server returns the TLDR and a link instead.

An API key is optional: anonymous access works within a rate limit shared by all unauthenticated users (HTTP 429 when busy), and a free key requested from Semantic Scholar gives you a dedicated allowance.

How to connect Semantic Scholar to Codex

  1. 1

    In the Arlet dashboard, open Data tools, find Semantic Scholar and switch it on. No API key setup is needed.

  2. 2

    In your terminal, run codex mcp add arlet --url https://mcp.arlet.dev/mcp/ to add Arlet as an MCP server.

  3. 3

    Codex detects OAuth support and opens your browser. Sign in with Google and click Allow on the consent screen.

  4. 4

    Once connected, both the CLI and the IDE extension can call Arlet tools (the configuration is shared).

If the browser does not open, run codex mcp login arlet to redo the authentication.

Use Semantic Scholar with other AI clients