How to integrate Semanticscholar MCP with Hermes

Hermes is a 24/7 autonomous agent that lives on your computer or server — it remembers what it learns and evolves as your usage grows. This guide explains the easiest and most robust way to connect your Semanticscholar account to Hermes. You can do this through either Composio Connect CLI or Composio Connect MCP. For personal use we recommend the CLI, but you won't go wrong with MCP either.

Semanticscholar logoSemanticscholar
Api Key

Semantic Scholar is an AI-powered academic search engine for scientific literature. It helps researchers quickly discover, analyze, and understand research papers across disciplines.

20 Tools

Introduction

Hermes is a 24/7 autonomous agent that lives on your computer or server — it remembers what it learns and evolves as your usage grows.

This guide explains the easiest and most robust way to connect your Semanticscholar account to Hermes. You can do this through either Composio Connect CLI or Composio Connect MCP. For personal use we recommend the CLI, but you won't go wrong with MCP either.

Also integrate Semanticscholar with

What is Composio Connect?

Composio Connect is a consumer offering that lets anyone plug 1,000+ applications directly into their agent harness — including Hermes. It can:

  • Search and load tools from relevant toolkits on-demand, reducing context usage.
  • Chain multiple tools to accomplish complex workflows via a remote workbench, without excessive back-and-forth with the LLM.
  • Manage app authentication end-to-end with zero manual overhead.

Integrating Semanticscholar with Hermes

Using Composio Connect CLI

1. Install the Composio CLI

Run the install script directly, or paste https://composio.dev/hermes into your Hermes chat box to have it installed for you.

bash
curl -fsSL https://composio.dev/install | bash
Hermes authenticating with Composio

2. Authenticate

Once the CLI is installed, ask Hermes to authenticate with Composio.

3. Connect to Semanticscholar

Ask your agent to connect to Semanticscholar, or simply request any Semanticscholar-related task. Hermes will prompt you to authenticate and authorize access.

4. Done. You're all set with a new Semanticscholar connection.


Using Composio Connect MCP

1. Get your MCP URL and API Key

Go to dashboard.composio.dev and copy your Connect MCP URL and API key.

Copy MCP URL and API key from Composio dashboard

2. Open the Hermes config file

bash
nano ~/.hermes/config.yaml

3. Add the Composio Connect MCP server

bash
mcp_servers:
  composio:
    url: "https://connect.composio.dev/mcp"
    headers:
      x-consumer-api-key: "YOUR_COMPOSIO_API_KEY"
    connect_timeout: 60
    timeout: 180

Save with Ctrl + O, Enter, then exit with Ctrl + X.

4. Restart your Hermes agent

Once restarted, ask your agent to connect to Semanticscholar or request any Semanticscholar-related task. It will prompt you to authenticate and authorize access.

5. Done!

What is the Semanticscholar MCP server, and what's possible with it?

The Semanticscholar MCP server is an implementation of the Model Context Protocol that connects your AI agent and assistants like Claude, Cursor, etc directly to your Semantic Scholar account. It provides structured and secure access to scholarly data, so your agent can search for academic papers, retrieve detailed author profiles, analyze citations, and explore references or publication histories on your behalf.

  • Comprehensive literature search and discovery: Let your agent search for academic papers by topic, author, or relevance and retrieve lists of matching publications with rich metadata.
  • In-depth paper and author insights: Ask your agent to fetch detailed information about specific papers—including titles, abstracts, authors, and publication years—or get complete profiles for researchers and their entire body of work.
  • Citation and reference analysis: Enable your agent to trace the impact of a paper by pulling its citations or explore the foundational research it builds upon by listing its references.
  • Batch retrieval for large-scale research: Efficiently gather details on multiple papers or authors at once, streamlining reviews and bibliometric analyses across large datasets.
  • Bulk and relevance-based queries: Use advanced bulk search and filtering to identify up to thousands of papers at a time, making it easy for your agent to support systematic literature reviews and academic data exploration.

Way Forward

With Semanticscholar connected, Hermes can now act on your behalf whenever it detects a relevant task or you ask it to.

From here, you can extend Hermes further:

  • Connect more apps: Calendar, Slack, Notion, Linear, and hundreds of others are available through the same Composio Connect setup. Each new integration compounds what Hermes can do for you.
  • Build workflows across tools: Once multiple apps are connected, Hermes can chain actions together — turn an email into a calendar invite, a Slack message into a Linear ticket, or a meeting note into a follow-up draft.
  • Let it learn your patterns: The more you use Hermes, the better it gets at anticipating how you'd handle recurring tasks. Give it feedback on drafts and decisions, and it will adapt.

If you run into trouble or want to share what you've built, join the community or check out the Docs for deeper configuration options.

TOOLS

Supported Tools

Every Semanticscholar action and event your agent gets out of the box.

Details about an author

Retrieve detailed information about an author from Semantic Scholar, including name, affiliations, publication statistics (paperCount, citationCount, h-index), external IDs (ORCID, DBLP), and optionally papers.

Details about an author s papers

Retrieves a list of papers authored or co-authored by a specific researcher identified by their unique Semantic Scholar author ID.

Details about a paper

Examples: https://api.

Details about a paper s authors

Retrieves the list of authors for a specific paper identified by its unique paper_id in the Semantic Scholar database.

Details about a paper s citations

Retrieves a list of citations for a specific academic paper using its unique Semantic Scholar paper ID.

Details about a paper s references

Retrieves the list of references cited by a specific paper in the Semantic Scholar database.

Get dataset download links

Tool to get download links for a specific dataset within a release.

Get dataset diffs

Get download links for incremental diffs between dataset releases.

Get details for multiple authors at once

Retrieves detailed information for multiple authors from Semantic Scholar in a single API call.

Get details for multiple papers at once

Retrieve detailed information for multiple academic papers in a single API call using the Semantic Scholar paper batch endpoint.

Get paper recommendations

Tool to get paper recommendations based on positive and negative example papers.

Get recommendations for paper

Tool to get recommended papers for a single positive example paper.

Get dataset release information

Tool to retrieve metadata for a specific Semantic Scholar dataset release.

List available dataset releases

Tool to list all available dataset releases from Semantic Scholar.

Paper title search

Behaves similarly to /paper/search, but is intended for retrieval of a single paper based on closest title match to given query.

Search Bulk Papers

Tool to perform bulk search for academic papers.

Search for authors by name

Search for academic authors in the Semantic Scholar database by name.

Search papers by relevance

Tool to search for academic papers by relevance in the Semantic Scholar database.

Suggest paper query completions

Get autocomplete suggestions for paper queries.

Text snippet search

Search for text snippets (~500 words) within academic papers that match your natural language query.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

With a standalone Semanticscholar MCP server, the agents and LLMs can only access a fixed set of Semanticscholar tools tied to that server. However, with the Composio Tool Router, agents can dynamically load tools from Semanticscholar and many other apps based on the task at hand, all through a single MCP endpoint.

Yes, you can. Hermes fully supports MCP integration. You get structured tool calling, message history handling, and model orchestration while Tool Router takes care of discovering and serving the right Semanticscholar tools.

Yes, absolutely. You can configure which Semanticscholar scopes and actions are allowed when connecting your account to Composio. You can also bring your own OAuth credentials or API configuration so you keep full control over what the agent can do.

All sensitive data such as tokens, keys, and configuration is fully encrypted at rest and in transit. Composio is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and follows strict security practices so your Semanticscholar data and credentials are handled as safely as possible.

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