Semantic Scholar

Free

semanticscholar.org

AI-powered academic search engine developed by the Allen Institute for AI to extract key findings and citation influences.

About Semantic Scholar

Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-backed academic search and discovery engine developed by the non-profit Allen Institute for AI (AI2). Designed to help researchers cut through the overwhelming volume of scientific publications, Semantic Scholar indexes over 200 million academic papers across computer science, biomedicine, neuroscience, and physical sciences.

The platform leverages proprietary machine learning and natural language processing models to extract structured insights from full-text PDFs. Semantic Scholar identifies 'Highly Influential Citations' (citations where the citing paper builds significantly upon the cited methodology), extracts automatic TLDR summaries (one-sentence takeaways of papers), and maps citation contexts directly in search results.

Semantic Scholar is 100% free and open to the global research community, providing public research APIs that power numerous third-party academic discovery tools like Connected Papers and Elicit. It also features Semantic Reader, an interactive PDF viewer with inline citation previews and mathematical formula explanations.

Key Features

Core capabilities and technical highlights of Semantic Scholar

Automated TLDR generation providing concise, neural one-sentence summaries of academic paper contributions.

Highly Influential Citations classification distinguishing meaningful methodological use from casual passing citations.

Semantic Reader interactive PDF technology providing inline card previews of cited papers, figures, and math symbols.

Free public academic API providing access to paper metadata, authors, citation graphs, and open-access PDFs.

Popular Use Cases

How teams, developers, and creators get value from Semantic Scholar

1Scan rapid one-sentence TLDR summaries of complex academic papers to determine relevance before reading full PDFs.

2Filter search results by Highly Influential Citations to discover papers that genuinely impacted a field's methodology.

3Read academic papers using Semantic Reader with interactive hover previews for citations, figures, and definitions.

4Access open academic data and metadata programmatically using the public Semantic Scholar Graph API.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions and answers regarding Semantic Scholar

Is Semantic Scholar free?

Yes, Semantic Scholar is completely free and non-profit, developed and maintained by the Allen Institute for AI to support global science.

What is a TLDR on Semantic Scholar?

TLDRs (Too Long; Didn't Read) are AI-generated, one-sentence summaries of the main objective and results of a research paper.

What are Highly Influential Citations?

They are citations identified by AI where the citing author meaningfully built upon or utilized the cited paper's methods, rather than just referencing it in passing.

What is Semantic Reader?

Semantic Reader is an augmented PDF reading interface that overlays clickable links and hover summaries over in-text citations and mathematical terms.

Can developers use Semantic Scholar data via API?

Yes, the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph API is freely accessible for non-commercial academic research and tool development.