December 2021 | Year in Review 

A Milestone for Semantic Scholar 

As we turned six this year, we also hit a record—200 million papers in our archives.
“Semantic Scholar is a poster child for AI2’s mission: AI for the Common Good,” says Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI. “When we launched it, we had no idea that it would serve upwards of 8 million users per month just a few years later.”

Product Updates

Highlighting new tools and services we've introduced this year to help you discover and understand new research.

• Research Dashboard: View AI-generated paper recommendations, see new papers from your alerts, and track your impact—all in one location. Now available for all users, sign in or register for a free account to get started.
  

• Semantic Reader: Based on the ScholarPhi research, Semantic Reader launched in Beta! This AI-powered augmented reading application provides more context for scholars, and we are excited to continue to develop this app in the new year. 

• TLDR Expansion: TLDRs provide auto-generated extreme summaries of scientific papers on search results and author pages. We expanded the coverage to nearly 60 million papers in biology, medicine, and computer science. 

• API: In response to feedback from the global research community, we made major improvements to our API this year including a new search endpoint, conference peer review service, and more fields including TLDRs.

New Leadership Takes the Helm

Daniel Weld has been promoted to General Manager and Chief Scientist of Semantic Scholar. Dan is a noted AI researcher who is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS). Read more at the AI2 blog.

Featured AI2er: Bailey Kuehl

Bailey Kuehl is a Data Science Analyst on the Semantic Scholar team at AI2. Along with offering expert annotations and data insights, she also helps ensure a smooth flow from the initial research idea to data collection and analysis. Learn more about Bailey and her work at the AI2 blog.

Research Updates

Our Research team studies information overload and develops AI tools to overcome it to help scholars everywhere. Check out some of the exciting work our Research group introduced this year.

• Doug Downey was recently appointed to lead Semantic Scholar's Research group. Read this interview to hear about the groundbreaking work from our Research team, and what's in store for 2022.

• SciA11y aims to improve accessibility of scientific documents. Hear from Lucy Lu Wang, who describes the current state of scientific PDF accessibility (or rather, inaccessibility), and introduces a new system that attempts to address some of the challenges identified. Spoiler: the vast majority of scientific PDFs we analyzed were not accessible.

• The SciA11y team also released a prototype of papertohtml.org, which converts PDFs to HTML for an improved reading experience. Check out the Paper Gallery to see it in action.

• S2AND (Semantic Scholar Author Name Disambiguation) was introduced this year to improve author pages on the site. Sergey Feldman and Daniel King wrote about S2AND for the AI2 blog, and the code and models are available on Github. 

Join our team!

Semantic Scholar is a free, AI-powered search engine for scientific literature based at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2). AI2 is a non-profit research institute founded in 2014 with the mission of conducting high-impact AI research and engineering in service of the common good.

We are hiring engineers, researchers, interns, and more. View open jobs with the Semantic Scholar team at AI2.