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Semantic Scholar Academic Graph API

Search 200M+ papers with AI relevance, citations and references, optional key

Semantic Scholar (Allen Institute for AI) exposes a graph of 200M+ academic papers, authors, citations and references. You can search by keyword, fetch a paper's full citation graph, and pull AI-generated TLDRs and embeddings. It works with no key against a shared rate-limit pool, and a free key gives you a dedicated, more reliable limit.

Free tier

Free; no key uses a shared pool. Free API key (by request) gives a dedicated ~1 req/sec

Rate limits

Unauthenticated: shared pool, default ~5,000 requests / 5 minutes across ALL anonymous users, so 429s are common under load. With a free key: ~1 request/second dedicated

Auth

API key

Base URL

https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1

What you'd build with it

  • Build a citation-graph explorer or related-work finder
  • Pull AI TLDRs to summarize a reading list for an agent
  • Rank papers by influence and citation count
  • Enrich a bibliography with abstracts and DOIs

Key endpoints

  • GET/paper/search?query={q}Relevance-ranked paper search
  • GET/paper/{id}Full metadata, abstract and TLDR for one paper
  • GET/paper/{id}/citationsPapers that cite this one
  • GET/paper/{id}/referencesPapers this one cites
Members

Members get the runnable recipe

Sign in free to copy the example request, see a sample response, and read the gotchas.

Tags

knowledgeresearchpaperscitationsreference