Semantic Scholar
A free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature
Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature, based at Ai2, the Allen Institute for AI. It is free to use with a free account option, and no paid plans are listed. It is for anyone who needs to do research across papers from all fields of science, and for developers who want paper search through an API.
What Semantic Scholar does
Search is the center of Semantic Scholar. Its index covers more than 240 million papers drawn from all fields of science, so a query is not limited to one discipline. The project is based at Ai2, the Allen Institute for AI, and the site describes the whole service as free.
Reading is handled by Semantic Reader, an augmented paper reader that adds context to scientific papers as you go through them. It is still in beta and is offered for select papers rather than every paper in the index, so whether it appears depends on what you open.
Anyone can create a free account, and the site also points to a Scholar's Hub and a beta program. For people building their own software, a developer API includes paper search, which makes it possible to pull results from the same literature index into scripts, research pipelines or other applications. No plans or prices are listed in the information we have for the tool. The search, the reader and the API are all described as part of the same free service, and no paid upgrade is mentioned on the pages we checked.
Features
- Search across 240,994,348 papers from all fields of science
- Semantic Reader augmented paper reader (beta)
- Developer API with paper search
- Free account creation
- Scholar's Hub and beta program
Strengths and limits
Each point comes from the features and plan details above. No point is an opinion.
Strengths
- Free to use, with free account creation.
- Search covers more than 240 million papers from all fields of science.
- A developer API includes paper search.
Limits
- Semantic Reader is still in beta.
- Semantic Reader is available only for select papers.
Semantic Scholar FAQ
Is Semantic Scholar free?
Yes. It describes itself as a free, AI-powered research tool for scientific literature, and users can create a free account.
Does Semantic Scholar have an API?
Yes. It offers an API for developers that includes paper search.
Where this listing comes from
Facts were read from these pages on Nov 6, 2026. The description was written from those facts. See the methodology.
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