Semantic Scholar

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 fields query parameter to specify returned fields (e.g., title,abstract,year,authors,citationCount,tldr).
• Supports limit and offset for 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)