Look up a paper's metadata via the Semantic Scholar Graph API
domain: api.semanticscholar.org · 6 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Send a GET request to /graph/v1/paper/<paper-id> where paper-id can be a Semantic Scholar ID, DOI (prefixed with DOI:), or arXiv ID (prefixed with ARXIV:)
Use the fields query parameter to specify which attributes to return (title, abstract, authors, citationCount, etc.)
Include an x-api-key header with an issued API key to access higher/authenticated rate-limit tiers
For looking up many papers at once, use the /graph/v1/paper/batch POST endpoint instead of individual GET calls
For open-ended queries, use /graph/v1/paper/search (or the bulk search variant) with a query parameter
Handle 429 responses with backoff, since even authenticated keys have per-second caps
Known gotchas
Even with an API key, the introductory authenticated rate limit is only about 1 request/second per endpoint — bulk work still requires the dedicated batch/bulk endpoints rather than looping individual calls
Unauthenticated requests are pooled across all public users and can be throttled unpredictably during high load
Paper IDs require the correct prefix (DOI:, ARXIV:, etc.) when not using the native Semantic Scholar ID — an unprefixed external ID will fail to resolve
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