Semantic Scholar

Semantic Scholar is free to use. It is an AI search engine for scientific literature, run by Ai2, and it is built to help researchers find relevant papers faster than keyword matching alone.

The service reads the meaning of scientific text rather than just matching terms, which is what the name refers to.

As an AI research tool, Semantic Scholar suits students, academics and anyone who has to track down papers on an unfamiliar topic.

You search the literature, then follow what the engine surfaces to related work.

The project describes itself as offering free AI-driven search and discovery tools plus open resources for the global research community, so the audience is wide and not limited to one field.

The listing also falls under AI API, which points to resources for developers who want to work with scholarly data in their own projects.

If you only need a place to look up papers, the search is the part you will use most.

Because it costs nothing and comes from a nonprofit research institute, trying it alongside your usual academic search is low risk.