# Semantic Scholar

> Free AI-powered search engine for scientific literature

Semantic Scholar is a free academic search engine built by Ai2, the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI. It indexes more than 200 million papers from all fields of science and adds AI-generated TLDR summaries, a ranking of highly influential citations and personalized Research Feeds. Its Academic Graph API and bulk datasets are open to developers.

- **Category:** AI Research Tools
- **Made by:** Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) (since 2015)
- **Website:** https://www.semanticscholar.org
- **Runs on:** Web, Browser extension
- **Facts last checked:** Oct 5, 2026

## Pricing

Semantic Scholar is free to use.

- **Pricing model:** Free
- **Free plan:** Entirely free, with no paid plans. Papers can be read without an account; a free account adds a library, email alerts, Research Feeds and author page claiming.
- **Free trial:** None listed.

| Plan | Price | What you get |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Free | $0 | Search, TLDR summaries, Semantic Reader, a paper library, alerts and Research Feeds, plus rate-limited API access. |

Read from https://www.semanticscholar.org/faq on Oct 5, 2026. Prices change, so confirm with Semantic Scholar before buying.

## Key features

- **Paper search with TLDR summaries:** Searches papers with filters for venue, author, publication type and date. TLDRs are very short AI summaries, available for nearly 60 million papers in computer science, biology and medicine.
- **Highly Influential Citations:** A machine-learning model flags the citations where the cited paper had a significant effect on the citing one, so a long citation list has a starting point.
- **Library and Research Feeds:** Save papers into folders, share public folders and bulk export citations. Turning on a Research Feed for a folder brings paper recommendations based on its contents.
- **Paper and author alerts:** Email alerts report new citations of a chosen paper, or new papers and citations for an author you follow.
- **Semantic Reader:** A beta reading view for most arXiv papers, with in-line citation cards, a table of contents, AI skimming highlights and on-demand definitions of terms.
- **Academic Graph API and datasets:** A REST API for papers, authors, citations, venues and recommendations, plus downloadable datasets. Most endpoints work without a key.

## Good for

- Free literature search across all fields of science
- Keeping up with new papers through alerts and recommendation feeds
- Developers who need open scholarly data through an API

## Worth knowing

- There is no smartphone app; the FAQ says the site is designed to be used in mobile browsers.
- TLDR summaries are limited to papers in computer science and the biomedical fields.
- Semantic Reader is in beta and covers mostly arXiv papers, and Ask This Paper works on a limited set of papers.
- Unauthenticated API calls share one pool of 1,000 requests per second; an API key starts at 1 request per second.

## Works with

Zotero, Mendeley, OpenAthens, LibKey, GetFTR

**Tags:** Research, AI search, Citations, Public API, AI features

## Alternatives

- [Consensus](https://toolgpa.com/tools/consensus): AI search engine that answers questions from peer-reviewed papers. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/consensus-vs-semantic-scholar)
- [Elicit](https://toolgpa.com/tools/elicit): AI research assistant for literature search and systematic reviews. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/elicit-vs-semantic-scholar)
- [ResearchRabbit](https://toolgpa.com/tools/researchrabbit): Literature discovery tool that maps how papers connect. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/researchrabbit-vs-semantic-scholar)
- [Connected Papers](https://toolgpa.com/tools/connected-papers): Visual graphs of similar academic papers for literature search. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/connected-papers-vs-semantic-scholar)
- [Scite](https://toolgpa.com/tools/scite): Research assistant that shows how papers have been cited. [Compare](https://toolgpa.com/compare/scite-vs-semantic-scholar)

## Sources

The prices, plans, platforms and features above were read from these pages on Oct 5, 2026:

- https://www.semanticscholar.org/faq
- https://www.semanticscholar.org
- https://www.semanticscholar.org/product
- https://www.semanticscholar.org/about
- https://www.semanticscholar.org/product/api
- https://www.semanticscholar.org/product/semantic-reader

Page: https://toolgpa.com/tools/semantic-scholar
Listed by ToolGPA (toolgpa.com).