Semantic Scholar

Overview

Choose the right Semantic Scholar API workflow before writing code or issuing requests. Prefer small, field-scoped online calls for interactive search, paper/search/bulk for large retrieval jobs, recommendations when the user already has seed papers, and datasets only for offline or release-based data pulls.

Workflow Decision Tree

Start by classifying the task:

• Use the Graph API for live paper or author lookup, metadata retrieval, query refinement, and batch fetches by known IDs.
• Use the Recommendations API when the user already has one or more relevant papers and wants similar or related work.
• Use the Datasets API when the user needs offline snapshots, release-to-release diffs, or corpus-scale ingestion rather than interactive search.

Then choose the endpoint pattern: