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Alex Spinov
Alex Spinov

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Semantic Scholar Has a Free API — Search 200M+ Papers With AI-Powered Relevance (No Key)

#python #api #beginners #tutorial

If you've ever searched Google Scholar and drowned in irrelevant results, Semantic Scholar's API will change your life.

It uses AI to rank papers by actual relevance, not just keyword matching. And it's completely free — no API key, no signup, no rate limit headaches.

What makes it different from Google Scholar?

Feature Google Scholar Semantic Scholar API
API access No official API Free, no key needed
Relevance ranking Keyword-based AI/ML-powered
Citation graph Limited Full citation + reference graph
Author disambiguation Poor Excellent (unique author IDs)
Rate limit Will ban you 100 requests/sec (generous!)
Structured data Scraping needed Clean JSON

Quick start — search papers in 5 lines 

import requests

query = "transformer architecture attention mechanism"
url = f"https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1/paper/search?query={query}&limit=5"
papers = requests.get(url).json().get("data", [])

for p in papers:
    print(f"  {p['title']}")
    print(f"  ID: {p['paperId']}\n")
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Output:

  Attention Is All You Need
  ID: 204e3073870fae3d05bcbc2f6a8e263d9b72e776

  BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers
  ID: df2b0e26d0599ce3e70df8a9da02e51594e0e992
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Get detailed paper info 

paper_id = "204e3073870fae3d05bcbc2f6a8e263d9b72e776"
fields = "title,year,citationCount,authors,abstract,fieldsOfStudy"
url = f"https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1/paper/{paper_id}?fields={fields}"

paper = requests.get(url).json()
print(f"Title: {paper['title']}")
print(f"Year: {paper['year']}")
print(f"Citations: {paper['citationCount']}")
print(f"Authors: {', '.join(a['name'] for a in paper['authors'][:3])}")
print(f"Fields: {paper['fieldsOfStudy']}")
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Output:

Title: Attention Is All You Need
Year: 2017
Citations: 120,000+
Authors: Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar
Fields: ['Computer Science']
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Follow the citation graph

This is where it gets powerful. Find who cited a paper and what it references:

# Get papers that cite "Attention Is All You Need"
url = f"https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1/paper/{paper_id}/citations?fields=title,year,citationCount&limit=5"
citations = requests.get(url).json().get("data", [])

print("Top citing papers:")
for c in sorted(citations, key=lambda x: x['citingPaper'].get('citationCount', 0), reverse=True):
    p = c['citingPaper']
    print(f"  [{p.get('citationCount',0):,} cites] {p['title']}")
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Search by author 

author_name = "Yann LeCun"
url = f"https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1/author/search?query={author_name}"
authors = requests.get(url).json().get("data", [])

for a in authors[:3]:
    detail_url = f"https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1/author/{a['authorId']}?fields=name,paperCount,citationCount,hIndex"
    detail = requests.get(detail_url).json()
    print(f"{detail['name']}: {detail['paperCount']} papers, {detail['citationCount']:,} citations, h-index {detail['hIndex']}")
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Real use cases

  1. Literature review automation — Find all papers on a topic, sorted by actual relevance
  2. Research trend analysis — Track citation growth over time for any field
  3. Competitor research — See what papers a company's researchers are publishing
  4. Academic tool building — Power citation managers, research assistants, recommendation engines

Rate limits

  • No API key: 100 requests per 5 minutes
  • With API key (free): 1 request/second sustained
  • Bulk access: Available for academic use

This is one of the most generous academic APIs I've found.

Comparison with other research APIs

API Papers Key needed Best for
Semantic Scholar 200M+ No AI-powered search, citation graphs
arXiv 2M+ No Physics, CS, Math preprints
Crossref 130M+ No DOI resolution, metadata
OpenAlex 250M+ No Bibliometrics, institution data

Try it yourself

The API docs are excellent: api.semanticscholar.org

No signup. No credit card. Just start making requests.

I write about free APIs developers should know about. Follow for more — I've covered 100+ APIs so far.

Building a data extraction tool? Check out my Apify scrapers and GitHub repos.

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