SciSummary Developer Documentation: API, SDK & CLI

Everything you need to integrate SciSummary — AI-powered scientific paper summarization — into your application, scripts, or AI agent.

Quick Links

OpenAPI 3.0 specification — canonical machine-readable API reference (https://scisummary.com/openapi.json)
API documentation endpoint — same specification, served at /api/documentation
SciSummary CLI on npm — official command-line tool (npm install -g scisummary)
MCP server — native tool calling for Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI agents
MCP manifest — machine-readable server manifest at /.well-known/mcp.json
API tokens — create and manage your bearer tokens
API pricing — plans for the bulk summarization API
llms.txt — agent-oriented site overview

REST API

The SciSummary REST API summarizes scientific articles in bulk. The base URL is https://scisummary.com/api. Authenticate every request with a bearer token from scisummary.com/api/tokens:

curl -X POST https://scisummary.com/api/batch \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SCISUMMARY_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls": ["https://example.com/paper"], "synchronous": true}'

The full API surface — batches, requests, summary modes, languages, and the shared error envelope — is described in the OpenAPI specification. Every operation has a unique operationId, typed parameters, and response schemas, so the spec works directly with OpenAPI code generators and LLM function calling.

Errors always use one JSON envelope: {"error": {"code", "message", "hint", "status"}} — inspect error.code for programmatic handling.

Command-Line Interface (CLI)

The official scisummary CLI wraps the REST API so you can summarize papers from your terminal, shell scripts, or agent toolchains. It requires Node.js 18.17+:

npm install -g scisummary
export SCISUMMARY_API_TOKEN=<your token>

# Summarize papers by URL, direct PDF link, or local PDF file
scisummary summarize https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00001
scisummary summarize ./paper.pdf --mode keypoints --language spanish

# Work with the API primitives directly
scisummary batch list
scisummary batch create --url https://example.com/article --dry-run
scisummary batch summarize <uuid> --sync
scisummary request get <uuid>

All output is JSON matching the REST API responses, so results pipe cleanly into jq and are easy for agents to parse. See the package page on npm for the full command reference.

SDKs

SciSummary is SDK-friendly by way of its fully typed OpenAPI 3.0 specification. Generate a client in your language of choice with any standard generator:

# TypeScript / JavaScript
npx openapi-typescript https://scisummary.com/openapi.json -o scisummary.d.ts

# Python, Java, Go, Ruby, PHP, and 50+ other languages
openapi-generator generate -i https://scisummary.com/openapi.json -g python -o ./scisummary-sdk

For JavaScript and TypeScript projects, the scisummary npm package doubles as a programmatic SDK — import SciSummaryClient from it instead of shelling out to the CLI.

MCP Server for AI Agents

AI agents can call SciSummary natively over the Model Context Protocol. The server speaks Streamable HTTP at https://scisummary.com/mcp, and the machine-readable manifest lives at /.well-known/mcp.json.

Support

Questions, partnership inquiries, or something not working? Contact the SciSummary team.