Connect Semantic Scholar to Copilot Studio
Query Semantic Scholar directly from Copilot Studio. 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 Copilot Studio
- 1
In the Arlet dashboard, open Data tools, find Semantic Scholar and switch it on. No API key setup is needed.
- 2
Sign in to Copilot Studio with your work account, create a new agent (or open an existing one), and in the Build tab choose Tools → + → Add → Model Context Protocol (MCP) in the right panel.
- 3
In the Add MCP server form, enter "Arlet" as the Server name, https://mcp.arlet.dev/mcp/ as the Server URL, choose OAuth 2.0 for Authentication and "Dynamic (detected)" for Configuration type, then click Add. No Client ID / Secret is needed.
- 4
On the Select a connection screen, choose Create new connection → Create, then sign in with Google on the Arlet authorization screen and click Allow. Click Add to attach the tool to the agent, then Publish to use it from Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Requires a Microsoft work account and a Copilot Studio license (or trial). MCP is available only for agents using generative orchestration and not in Copilot Studio in Teams.