---
id: semanticscholar
version: "0.12.0"
license: MIT
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# semanticscholar — Unofficial Python client library for Semantic Scholar APIs.

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 114.1K/mo

## What it is and what it does

semanticscholar is an unofficial Python wrapper around Semantic Scholar's public APIs, designed to simplify access to academic metadata, recommendations, and datasets. It abstracts away HTTP details by providing a typed client interface that handles pagination automatically and supports both synchronous and asynchronous request patterns.

The library is intended for researchers, developers, and data scientists who need to programmatically fetch paper metadata, citations, and related academic information. It depends on httpx for HTTP communication and tenacity for request retry logic, making it suitable for production use where network reliability matters.

Use it for:

- Fetch metadata for academic papers by DOI or ID to build a local research database.
- Query the Semantic Scholar Recommendations API to discover related papers for a given publication.
- Retrieve dataset information from Semantic Scholar's Datasets API for research reproducibility.
- Build a citation graph or co-authorship analysis tool using the Academic Graph API.
- Integrate paper search and metadata into a research management or literature review application.

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Provides a typed Python client for querying Semantic Scholar's Academic Graph, Recommendations, and Datasets APIs, with support for paginated responses and asynchronous requests.

Yes. The package has low install friction, active maintenance, permissive licensing, no known vulnerabilities, and fills a clear need for programmatic access to Semantic Scholar data. It's suitable for research, academic, and commercial projects that require scholarly metadata retrieval.

## Install

pip install semanticscholar
uv add semanticscholar
poetry add semanticscholar

## Installing semanticscholar

Before you install: Low install friction with only two runtime dependencies (tenacity and httpx). Marked as active maintenance with a recent release in March 2026, supporting current Python versions from 3.10 through 3.14.

License in practice: MIT license (permissive) means you can use, modify, and distribute this library freely with minimal restrictions, making it suitable for both open-source and commercial projects.

Quickstart:

pip install semanticscholar

from semanticscholar import SemanticScholar

sch = SemanticScholar()
paper = sch.get_paper('10.1093/mind/lix.236.433')
print(paper.title)

Requires Python 3.10 or later; API access depends on Semantic Scholar's service availability and rate limits.

Verify before relying:

- Whether asynchronous request support is documented with concrete examples in the library's usage guide.
- Rate limiting behavior and any API key requirements for the Semantic Scholar endpoints.
- Performance characteristics when handling large paginated result sets.

## Package facts

- License: MIT (permissive)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 114.1K/month (top 15,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

semantic scholar api client, academic paper metadata lookup, research paper search python, scholarly article retrieval, academic graph api wrapper, paper metadata fetching, research database client, academic-data, api-client, research-tools

[View on SkillFed](https://skillfed.io/packages/semanticscholar) · [View on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/semanticscholar/)