Semantic Scholar

Free research paper search with one-line summaries and a citation map

Semantic Scholar is a free search engine over hundreds of millions of research papers from the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI. It shows a one-sentence summary of each paper, influential citations and related work, and lets you read open-access PDFs with term explanations. It helps you quickly check whether research exists on a topic.

Free plan

Completely free; sign-up is needed only for a library and alerts

Semantic Scholar pricing

Tasks it handles well

• Find research studies on a topic
• Check a claim against the primary source

Most useful for

• Lawyer
• HR manager
• Finance manager
• Manager
• Marketer
• Sales manager
• Data analyst
• Teacher
• Executive assistant
• Logistics manager
• Procurement manager
• Secretary

Pitfalls to watch at work

• The one-sentence summary is generated automatically: read the results section before drawing conclusions
• Searching in English returns far more than other languages
• Full text is available only for open-access papers

Billing

The service is free and needs no payment.

Compare Semantic Scholar with

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