Free academic search with AI summaries and citation context
Semantic Scholar is a free research service from the Allen Institute for AI that indexes scholarly papers across disciplines and adds machine-learning features on top of ordinary search. Results carry a short generated summary of the paper, citation contexts showing how later work refers to it, and links to related papers and authors. It also offers a public API, which is why it appears inside many other research tools. Access is free, the index is broad rather than complete, and coverage of very recent papers or non-English venues is uneven.
Last updated: 2026-09-20. This site only provides an index; for exact features, pricing, and licensing, see the official website.
academic search, citation checking, finding related papers and api research work
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Yes, within published rate limits, and an API key raises them. That openness is why so many literature tools quietly depend on this index for the citation data they display.
They are generated from the paper text, so they are a quick orientation rather than a substitute for the abstract. Read the original for numbers, methods and limitations before citing anything.
No. It is a discovery layer over indexed sources, so paywalled content may be listed without full text, and very recent papers can lag behind their publication date.
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