Semantic Scholar

Semantic Scholar — User Guide

Academic search; 200M+ papers.

Strengths
  • Completely free, covering 200 million+ academic papers
  • AI generated TLDR (one sentence summary)
  • Powerful citation analysis and impact assessment
  • Knowledge graph in the research field
  • Provide free API
Best for
  • Academic paper search and discovery
  • Understand the impact and citations of a paper
  • Discover relevant studies and authors
  • Track trends in research areas
  • Constructing a literature review

Paper search and discovery

Semantic Scholar’s ​​AI can understand academic concepts and provide more accurate search results than Google Scholar.

Scenario

Search for a specific research topic

Prompt example
Enter your research topic in the search box:


"attention mechanism transformer natural language processing"




Search results include:


- Paper title and author


- TLDR (AI generated one sentence summary)


- Citation count and impact score


- Year of publication and journal/conference




Filter options:


- Filter by year (only view the last 3 years)


- Sort by citation count


- Filter by open access (see only those that are free to download)
Output / what to expect

Find a list of related papers,

TLDR helps quickly determine whether a paper is worth reading in depth.

Citation counts help identify important papers in the field.

Tips

Use the TLDR function to quickly filter and only truly relevant papers are worth the time to read the full text.

Scenario

Analyzing a paper’s citation network

Prompt example
Open a paper and view:

1. "Cited By"
   - Which papers cited this article
   - Understand the impact of this paper

2. "References"
   - What work is cited in this paper?
   - Understand the research background

3. "Recommended Papers"
   -Related papers recommended by AI
   - Discover important work that may have been missed
Output / what to expect

Through the citation network,

You can quickly understand the context of a research field,

Find the most important foundational papers and recent advances.

Tips

Starting from highly cited review papers (Survey), you can quickly understand the full picture of a field.

Use API

Semantic Scholar offers a free API that can be integrated into research tools.

Scenario

Search papers using the API

Prompt example
import requests

# Search papers (no API Key required)
url = "https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1/paper/search"
params = {
    "query": "large language models code generation",
    "limit": 5,
    "fields": "title,authors,year,citationCount,abstract"
}

response = requests.get(url, params=params)
papers = response.json()["data"]

for paper in papers:
    print(f"Title: {paper['title']}")
    print(f"Year: {paper['year']}")
    print(f"Citation count: {paper['citationCount']}")
    print(f"Abstract: {paper['abstract'][:200]}...")
    print()
Output / what to expect

Return structured paper data,

Can be integrated into your own research tools,

No API Key is required to use basic functionality.

Tips

The free API has a rate limit (100 times/5 minutes), and applying for an API Key can get a higher limit.

Compared with similar tools

ToolStrengthBest forPricing
Semantic Scholar This toolCompletely free, AI summary, strong citation analysis, open APIAcademic research, literature review, paper discoverycompletely free
Google ScholarBroadest coverage, including gray literatureThe most comprehensive academic searchcompletely free
ConsensusAI directly extracts research conclusionsNeed to quickly understand research conclusionsFree version/paid version
ElicitAutomatically extract key information from paperssystematic literature reviewFree version/paid version