List papers that CITE a given paper (the works citing it), with their titles, authors, year, and citation counts. Useful for forward citation tracing and finding follow-up work. Keyless.
AI agents call get_paper_citations to retrieve information from Mcp Semanticscholar without modifying anything — typically the context-gathering step in research, monitoring, and reporting workflows, before the agent takes action elsewhere.
| Parameter | Type | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
limit | number | — | Max citing papers to return (default 10, max 25). |
paper_id | string | Yes | Paper identifier. A Semantic Scholar ID, or prefixed: "DOI:10...", "arXiv:2106.15928", "CorpusId:...". |
Parameters from the server's own tool schema.
This tool retrieves scholarly metadata from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph. It queries and returns information about citations without creating, modifying, deleting, or executing anything. The blast radius of misuse is minimal—an agent cannot harm data or systems by querying citation relationships. This is a straightforward Read operation.
From the tool's definition The tool 'list papers that CITE a given paper' with 'titles, authors, year, and citation counts' performs data retrieval with no modification, deletion, or execution capabilities.
Attacks that exploit this kind of access
List papers that CITE a given paper (the works citing it), with their titles, authors, year, and citation counts. Useful for forward citation tracing and finding follow-up work. Keyless. It is categorised as a Read tool in the Mcp Semanticscholar MCP Server, which means it retrieves data without modifying state.
get_paper_citations accepts 2 parameters: limit, paper_id. Required: paper_id. The full parameter table on this page comes from the server's own tool schema.
Register the Mcp Semanticscholar MCP server in PolicyLayer and add a rule for get_paper_citations: allow, deny, rate-limit, or require approval. Point your MCP client at the PolicyLayer proxy URL and the rule is enforced on every call, before it reaches Mcp Semanticscholar. Nothing to install.
get_paper_citations is a Read tool with low risk. Read-only tools are generally safe to allow by default.
Yes. Add a rate_limit block to the get_paper_citations rule in your PolicyLayer policy. For example, setting max: 10 and window: 60 limits the tool to 10 calls per minute. Rate limits are tracked per agent session and reset automatically.
Set action: deny in the PolicyLayer policy for get_paper_citations. The AI agent will receive a policy violation error and cannot call the tool. You can also include a reason field to explain why the tool is blocked.
get_paper_citations is provided by the Mcp Semanticscholar MCP server (https://gateway.pipeworx.io/semanticscholar/mcp). PolicyLayer sits as a proxy in front of this server to enforce policies before tool calls reach the server.
Every MCP server has a record like this.
Type a name, get the same breakdown: verified identity, auth posture, risk grade, capabilities, recommended policy.
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