semanticscholar API for agents (unofficial) — JSON over curl | clify
Semantic Scholar, an AI-powered search engine for scientific literature. The CLI searches and looks up papers, authors, citations, references and recommendations through the official Semantic Scholar Academic Graph and Recommendations APIs, and also offers the web app's title autocomplete.
Host: semanticscholar.org. Call these verified read commands with plain curl; no install, key, or account. Use the public JSON API with plain curl. No install, key, account, or browser is needed. Example: curl 'https://clify-dev.netlify.app/sites.json'. Start with /search?q=weather, then call /abc/COMMAND. Responses are one JSON object. The hosted MCP and GitHub repo are also available.
Commands
match-paper-title
Find the single paper that best matches a given title (returns 404 if there is no good match) Params: query*, api_fields, apiKey
curl 'https://clify-dev.netlify.app/semanticscholar/match-paper-title?query=Attention+is+All+you+Need'
get-paper-citations
List the papers that cite a given paper (citing papers, with context/intents) Params: paper_id*, api_fields, offset, api_limit, apiKey
curl 'https://clify-dev.netlify.app/semanticscholar/get-paper-citations'
get-author
Get an author profile: name, affiliations, homepage, paper count, citation count, h-index Params: author_id*, api_fields, apiKey
curl 'https://clify-dev.netlify.app/semanticscholar/get-author'
autocomplete-papers
Title and query suggestions for partial text, as shown in the semanticscholar.org search box Params: q*
curl 'https://clify-dev.netlify.app/semanticscholar/autocomplete-papers?q=attention+is+all+you'