Research Paper APIs and Tools: arXiv, Semantic Scholar and More
Open APIs and tools for finding, mapping and reading scientific papers, for a research agent or your own literature review.
For your agent: agent.md · MCP find_resources("research papers")
Open sources
API, key and license read on each source's own pages
| Source | API | Key | Commercial use |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 | Commercial use 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| arXiv The open preprint server for physics, maths, computer science and other fields, with a free keyless query API, OAI-PMH metadata harvesting and full-text PDFs and sources in bulk on Amazon S3. |
Official API · Free | No | Commercial use OK |
Libraries
From Tools
Build ideas
A daily digest of new papers on your topicAn agent that reads new arXiv papers in your field every morning and sends a short digest with links.Paper search for your research agentGive your agent a tool that finds papers, their citations and authors through the Semantic Scholar API, and links the arXiv preprint when there is one.