IAverse

Complete guide to Semantic Scholar

Getting startedUse casesAdvanced setupTipsFAQ

Getting started

Go to semanticscholar.org, free and no sign-up required for basic searches (create an account if you want to save alerts and libraries). Search for a topic or paste a paper's title: the platform, developed by the Allen Institute for AI, indexes over 200 million articles and shows a one-sentence TLDR summary next to each result. Explore the citation graph to see which papers influenced the study and which cite it afterward, and use "Ask This Paper" to ask direct questions about a specific article.

Use cases

Academic search with instant summaries
The TLDR lets you decide in seconds whether a paper is relevant before investing time reading it in full.
Citation graph exploration
Visualize which prior studies underpin a paper and which later research has cited it, ideal for mapping a field of study.
New publication alerts (Research Feeds)
Set up personalized feeds to get notified when new papers related to your research interests are published.
Direct questions to a paper (Ask This Paper)
Get AI-generated answers backed by the exact sentences from the article, without manually searching for the relevant passage.

Advanced setup

  1. Create a personal library
    With a free account, save papers into topic folders accessible from any device.
  2. Set up Research Feeds
    In your profile, add topics or authors of interest to get an automatic feed of relevant new publications.
  3. Use the public API
    Sign up for a free API key to programmatically query papers' metadata, summaries, and semantic embeddings.
  4. Filter by field of study and date
    Use the sidebar search filters to narrow results by discipline, publication year, or study type.

Tips

  • Use the citation graph's "influential citations" mode to identify which papers truly were turning points in the topic, not just the most cited overall.
  • Combine Semantic Scholar with Consensus or Elicit: Semantic Scholar excels at exploring the map of a field, while the others are better for synthesizing concrete evidence.
  • Take advantage of it being completely free, unlike other AI research tools that charge for advanced features.
  • Review the TLDR, but don't rely on it alone for critical topics: it's an automatically generated one-sentence summary and may omit important nuances.

FAQ

Is Semantic Scholar paid?
No, it's a free service from the Allen Institute for AI (a non-profit organization), including its public API.
Does it include papers from all disciplines?
Yes, it covers sciences, medicine, computer science, social sciences, and humanities, though its coverage is especially strong in computer science and biomedicine.
What exactly is the TLDR?
An AI-generated one-sentence summary that condenses the paper's main contribution, useful for quickly screening search results.
Can I use the data for my own applications?
Yes, the public API allows programmatic access to metadata, summaries, and citation relationships to integrate into your own tools.
Based on Researched via web search in July 2026 (semanticscholar.org/product and Allen Institute for AI).
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