Semantic Scholar Research Paper Tracker

Semantic Scholar Research Paper Tracker — Academic Papers, Citations & Authors

Search and track academic research papers using the Semantic Scholar public API. If its keyword search is unavailable or rate-limited, search mode falls back to the keyless OpenAlex Works API. Author, paper-ID, and recommendation modes still use Semantic Scholar only. No API key required.

OpenAlex fallback rows keep the same output field names and link to OpenAlex. Semantic Scholar-specific fields such as influential_citation_count and arxiv_id are null when OpenAlex does not provide them; pdf_url is null unless a direct PDF URL is available.

Covers all major research domains: AI/ML, computer science, biology, medicine, physics, economics, and more.

What You Get

For each paper, the actor returns:

• Title, abstract (up to 1000 characters), year, publication date
• Venue / journal name
• Authors (up to 10, with author IDs)
• Citation count, reference count, influential citation count
• Fields of study (Computer Science, Medicine, Biology, etc.)
• Open access PDF URL when freely available
• External IDs — DOI, ArXiv ID, PubMed ID
• Direct URL to the paper on Semantic Scholar, or OpenAlex for fallback rows
• Publication type — Journal Article, Conference Paper, Preprint, etc.

Modes

Mode	Description	Key Input
search	Keyword search across all papers	query
author	Browse papers by a specific author	authorQuery
paper	Look up specific papers by ID	paperIds
recommendations	Find papers similar to a seed paper	paperIds[0]

Input Parameters

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	"search"	Fetch mode (see table above)
query	string	"large language models"	Keyword query for search mode
limit	integer	20	Max papers to return (max 500)
sort	string	"relevance"	Sort by: relevance, citationCount, year
fieldsOfStudy	string	—	Filter: "Computer Science" or "Medicine,Biology"
yearRange	string	—	Year filter: "2024", "2020-2024", "2022-"
openAccessOnly	boolean	false	Only papers with free PDF
authorQuery	string	—	Author name for author mode
paperIds	array	[]	ArXiv IDs, S2 IDs, or DOIs

Sample Output

{
  "paper_id": "204e3073870fae3d05bcbc2f6a8e263d9b72e776",
  "title": "Attention Is All You Need",
  "abstract": "The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks...",
  "year": 2017,
  "publication_date": "2017-06-12",
  "venue": "Neural Information Processing Systems",
  "publication_types": ["Conference"],
  "fields_of_study": ["Computer Science"],
  "authors": [
    {"id": "1234", "name": "Ashish Vaswani"},
    {"id": "5678", "name": "Noam Shazeer"}
  ],
  "citation_count": 95420,
  "reference_count": 38,
  "influential_citation_count": 8450,
  "is_open_access": true,
  "pdf_url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762",
  "doi": "10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762",
  "arxiv_id": "1706.03762",
  "url": "https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/204e3073...",
  "fetched_at": "2025-01-15T12:00:00Z"
}

Examples

Search for recent AI papers with open access PDF:

{
  "mode": "search",
  "query": "transformer language model fine-tuning",
  "limit": 50,
  "sort": "citationCount",
  "fieldsOfStudy": "Computer Science",
  "yearRange": "2022-",
  "openAccessOnly": true
}

Get all papers by Geoffrey Hinton (sorted by citations):

{
  "mode": "author",
  "authorQuery": "Geoffrey Hinton",
  "limit": 100
}

Look up specific papers by ArXiv ID:

{
  "mode": "paper",
  "paperIds": ["2303.08774", "2307.09288", "1706.03762"]
}

Get recommendations similar to GPT-4 paper:

{
  "mode": "recommendations",
  "paperIds": ["8ca62fdf4c276ea3052dc96dcfd8ee96ca425a48"],
  "limit": 30
}

Use Cases

• Literature review automation — pull all papers on a topic sorted by impact
• Citation tracking — monitor how many times a paper has been cited over time
• Researcher profiling — analyze a scientist's publication history and h-index
• AI research monitoring — track new LLM, multimodal, or agent papers weekly
• Investment research — find scientific evidence for tech/biotech investment theses
• Grant and publication discovery — find open-access papers for research reports
• Academic data pipelines — feed paper data into RAG systems or knowledge graphs

Pricing

Pay-per-event: $0.001 per paper returned (~$0.02 for the default 20 papers, $0.50 for 500 papers).

FAQ

How many papers does Semantic Scholar cover? Over 200 million papers across all academic disciplines, with strong coverage of STEM fields and growing social science/humanities coverage.

Are there rate limits? Semantic Scholar may rate-limit unauthenticated traffic. Search retries 429 responses with bounded backoff, then uses OpenAlex if Semantic Scholar remains unavailable.

How current is the data? Semantic Scholar continuously ingests new papers. ArXiv preprints typically appear within days of posting; journal articles within weeks of publication.

Can I get the full paper text? Only abstracts are returned directly. The pdf_url field provides a link to the full PDF when the paper is open access.

What ArXiv ID formats are supported? Both formats work: "1706.03762" (numeric) and "arXiv:1706.03762". For DOIs, pass the full DOI string.

---

Related actors

• PubMed Medical Papers Tracker — Biomedical literature from PubMed to complement Semantic Scholar's broader paper index
• Patent Search Tracker — US patents citing academic papers found via Semantic Scholar
• Open Library Search — Book catalog to supplement academic paper research workflows

Feedback

If this actor powers your research workflows, a review helps others find it: Leave a review on Apify Store

---

Keywords: Semantic Scholar API scraper, academic paper search, citation tracker, research paper extractor, AI ML paper search, biology research papers, open access PDF finder, paper abstract extractor, author citation count, DOI extractor academic, scientific literature search, machine learning papers tracker, Semantic Scholar dataset, academic research monitor