Semantic Scholar

A free, AI-powered academic search engine from the non-profit Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). It helps students find, summarize, and understand scientific papers across 236M+ studies in every field.

Best for: Free scholarly search across 200M+ papers

What you get

• Completely free with no paid tiers or paywalls; search 236M+ papers across all disciplines
• AI features: TLDR one-sentence summaries, Semantic Reader PDF viewer, Highly Influential Citations, and personalized research feeds
• Free developer REST API for paper, author, and citation data; optional free API key unlocks higher rate limits
• Run by the non-profit Allen Institute for AI (Ai2); no cost or student sign-up required to search

How students use it

• Find papers and trace their citations for free
• Read TL;DR summaries of dense abstracts
• Build a reading list for a new topic