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

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") Output: Attention I