How to integrate Semanticscholar MCP with OpenClaw

OpenClaw is the fastest growing agent harness out there, which can work 24/7 to automate almost any kind of tasks. However, its capabilities are limited to the tools it has access to. Composio allows your OpenClaw to access Semanticscholar with authentication management handled for you. You can execute actions on Semanticscholar via your favorite OpenClaw interface (Telegram, WhatsApp, TUI, etc), whichever you prefer.

Why use Composio?

Apart from a managed and hosted MCP server, you will get:

• Programmatic tool calling allows LLMs to write its code in a remote workbench to handle complex tool chaining. Reduces to-and-fro with LLMs for frequent tool calling.
• Handling Large tool responses out of LLM context to minimize context rot.
• Dynamic just-in-time access to 20,000 tools across 850+ other Apps for cross-app workflows. It loads the tools you need, so LLMs aren't overwhelmed by tools you don't need.

How to install Semanticscholar with OpenClaw

Using Composio API Key and Setup Prompt

• Go to dashboard.composio.dev/composio/~/connect/clients/openclaw
• Copy the setup prompt

• Run it in your OpenClaw chat interface.
• Authenticate Semanticscholar from the dashboard
• Go back to your OpenClaw interface and start asking questions.

Using OpenClaw/Composio Plugin

1. Install OpenClaw Composio plugin

2. Copy the API Key from dashboard.composio.dev

3. Setup OpenClaw Config

openclaw config set plugins.entries.composio.config.consumerKey "ck_your_key_here"

4. Restart OpenClaw

openclaw gateway restart

5. Go to your chat interface and start asking questions.

6. When prompted, authenticate the app and you're all set.

How It Works

The plugin connects to Composio's MCP server at https://connect.composio.dev/mcp and registers all available tools directly into the OpenClaw agent. Tools are called by name — no extra search or execute steps needed.

If a tool returns an auth error, the agent will prompt you to connect that toolkit at dashboard.composio.dev.

Configuration

{
  "plugins": {
    "entries": {
      "composio": {
        "enabled": true,
        "config": {
          "consumerKey": "ck_your_key_here"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

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.

Conclusion

You've successfully integrated Semanticscholar with OpenClaw using Composio plugin. Now interact with Semanticscholar directly from your terminal, Web UI, or any messenger app using natural language commands.

Key benefits of this setup:

• Seamless integration across TUI, Web UIs, and Messenger apps like Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack, etc.
• Natural language commands for Semanticscholar operations
• Managed authentication through Composio
• Access to 20,000+ tools across 850+ apps for cross-app workflows
• Programmatic tool calling for complex tool chaining

Next steps:

• Try asking OpenClaw to perform various Semanticscholar operations
• Explore cross-app workflows by connecting more toolkits like Calendar, Slack, Notion, etc.
• Build complex automation scripts that leverage OpenClaw's 24/7 running capabilities