Research tools
Search engines, maps and AI assistants for scientific papers. 5 resources; API, key, license and embedding quoted from each site's own pages, checked Oct 23, 2026.
Semantic Scholar
You can walk the citation network of almost any paper in code, from a single lookup to a full snapshot of the whole graph.
API, no keyDownloadCommercial: conditions
Connected Papers
Starting from a single paper you get a map of its neighbourhood, which quickly shows the key works you missed.
APICommercial: conditions
Elicit
It does the dull part of a literature review, screening and pulling numbers out of papers, and shows the source for every claim.
API (paid)Commercial: conditions
Consensus
For a yes/no question it shows how the studies split, which says more than any single paper.
API (paid)License unclear
SciSpace
You can upload a dense paper and ask it plain questions, with each answer pointing back to the paragraph it came from.
License unclear
Side by side
| Resource | API | Key | Data download | Commercial use | Embed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Semantic Scholar A free search engine for scientific papers from Ai2, with a public Academic Graph API and bulk dataset releases of papers, authors, citations and abstracts. |
Official API · Free | No | Yes (json) | Commercial use with conditions | Embedding with conditions |
| Connected Papers A web tool that takes one paper and draws a graph of related papers grouped by similarity, so you can see earlier and later work in a field. |
Official API | Yes | — | Commercial use with conditions | Embedding unclear |
| Elicit An AI research assistant that searches 138 million academic papers and 545,000 clinical trials and turns the results into tables, systematic reviews and cited reports. |
Official API · Paid | Yes | — | Commercial use with conditions | Embedding with conditions |
| Consensus An AI search engine over 400 million scholarly papers that answers research questions with cited summaries and a meter of how many studies say yes or no. |
Official API · Paid | Yes | — | Commercial use unclear | No embedding |
| SciSpace An AI research assistant for reading and writing papers: chat with a PDF, search over 280 million papers, pull data out of many PDFs and format citations. |
API unclear | — | — | Commercial use unclear | Embedding unclear |