A free AI research engine across 200M+ academic papers, with TLDRs and citation graphs.
Semantic Scholar indexes over 200 million papers and uses NLP to surface TLDRs, key claims, and influence graphs. Ask a question and get cited sources ranked by impact, not just recency. The free API powers half the research startups on the web.
Who it's for: Students, academics, and R&D teams who need to navigate the literature without paywalls or endless PubMed scrolling.
Every paper gets a one-sentence TLDR so you can triage 50 results in minutes.
See which papers a work builds on and which cite it — skip the noise.
Search in plain English and get relevant, cited passages, not keyword matches.
Programmatic access to the corpus for your own research tooling.
For literature discovery, Semantic Scholar is the free default in 2026. Pair it with Elicit or Consensus for synthesis, and you've got a research stack that costs nothing.