Semantic Scholar
Free tierAI-powered academic search engine for scientific literature
Free·All audiences·Powered by Allen Institute for AI (AI2)·API available
Key strengths
AI-powered semantic search across 200M+ academic papersFree public API for programmatic access to paper metadataCitation graph and influence analysisAuto-generated TLDRs for rapid paper comprehensionInterdisciplinary coverage across all major scientific fields
Completely free
Seattle, USA
Founded 2015
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Semantic Scholar API – Developer Guide
Semantic Scholar provides a free, rate-limited public REST API at https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1/.
Key Endpoints
GET /paper/{paper_id} # Fetch paper metadata by S2 ID, DOI, ArXiv ID, etc.
GET /paper/search # Full-text paper search with field filters
GET /paper/{paper_id}/citations # Retrieve citing papers
GET /paper/{paper_id}/references# Retrieve referenced papers
GET /author/{author_id} # Fetch author profile and paper list
Parameters & Fields
- Use the
fieldsquery parameter to specify returned fields (e.g.,title,abstract,year,authors,citationCount,tldr). - Supports
limitandoffsetfor pagination. - Authentication via an API key header (
x-api-key) unlocks higher rate limits.
Bulk Data Access
The S2ORC (Semantic Scholar Open Research Corpus) provides bulk downloads of structured full-text papers for large-scale NLP and ML research. Available on request.
Rate Limits
- Unauthenticated: 100 requests/5 min
- Authenticated (free API key): 1 request/sec (higher limits available for research partners)