Semantic Scholar
Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered academic search engine developed by the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) that indexes over 214 million scholarly papers with 2.49 billion citations and 79 million authors. The platform provides a public REST API organized into three services: Academic Graph (papers, authors, citations, venues, and SPECTER2 embeddings), Recommendations (paper similarity and interest-based suggestions), and Datasets (bulk downloadable corpus snapshots updated monthly). API access is available without authentication at a shared rate limit, or with a free API key obtained via request for a dedicated 1 RPS allowance. Semantic Scholar supports AI agent integrations through multiple community-built MCP servers that expose its academic graph to LLM-based toolchains.
APIs
Semantic Scholar Academic Graph API
RESTful API providing access to 214M+ academic papers, 79M authors, 2.49B citations, venues, and SPECTER2 vector embeddings. Supports single-item lookups, keyword search, bulk r...
Semantic Scholar Recommendations API
Returns recommended papers similar to a given publication or aligned with a learned model of a researcher's topical interests. Supports both single-paper and multi-paper positiv...
Semantic Scholar Datasets API
Provides downloadable bulk snapshots of the full Semantic Scholar academic graph, updated monthly. Supports incremental diff downloads between releases. Requires an API key for ...