Semantic Scholar is a free search engine for academic literature run by Ai2, the non-profit AI research institute. It indexes more than 200 million papers from publisher partnerships, data providers and web crawling, covering every field of science.
Its AI models read and classify papers so you can judge a result quickly, see how papers connect, and follow citations to related work. You can save papers to a personal library and set up research feeds that suggest new papers in your area. Semantic Reader, an augmented reading view, is available for selected papers.
The service is completely free to use. For developers, Ai2 also offers a free API and open datasets of paper records and full text.
For students in Pakistan writing a literature review or thesis, it is a good starting point next to Google Scholar and the HEC Digital Library. Many results link to free PDFs, though some papers stay behind publisher paywalls.
