Semantic Scholar
Semantic Scholar is a free AI-powered search and discovery tool for scientific literature from Ai2, with an open API and datasets of papers and citations.
About this tool
Semantic Scholar is a free search engine for scientific literature developed by Ai2, the Allen Institute for AI. It indexes more than 200 million academic papers from publisher partnerships, data providers and web sources, and uses machine learning to help researchers grasp papers quickly and find related work.
Its models extract meaning from papers and identify connections between them, which powers features such as concise overviews, recommendations and citation exploration. For developers, the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph API provides data on papers, authors, citations and venues, along with paper embeddings, recommendations and downloadable datasets that many research tools build on.
What you can do
AI-powered paper search
Search a large index of academic literature with relevance ranking designed for scientific content.
Paper understanding
Models extract key information so researchers can understand what a paper is about at a glance.
Academic Graph API
Query papers, authors, citations and venues, retrieve SPECTER2 embeddings and get recommendations programmatically.
Open datasets
Download datasets from the academic graph for research projects and tool building.
Who is it for?
- A researcher explores the citations around a landmark paper.
- A developer builds a literature-mapping tool on the public API.
- A student finds related work for a dissertation chapter.
Before you choose
Coverage and metadata quality vary by field and publisher; cross-check important searches with other databases.
API rate limits apply; request a key for heavier use and respect the license terms of the datasets.
Frequently asked questions
Is Semantic Scholar free?
Yes, Semantic Scholar is a free research tool, and most public API endpoints can be used without authentication.
Who runs Semantic Scholar?
It is built by a research and product team within Ai2, the Allen Institute for AI.
How many papers does it index?
Semantic Scholar states that it indexes more than 200 million academic papers.
Check the official website for current features, pricing, and terms.
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