# Semantic Scholar Academic Search

> Semantic Scholar Academic Search is a paid API for AI agents from scout.hugen.tokyo, paid per call via x402, $0.01/call, status unknown (last checked 2026-10-10, last successful call 2026-05-05).

Searches Semantic Scholar's 200M+ academic papers with citation graph data for literature review and research intelligence

## Facts

- Endpoint: GET https://scout.hugen.tokyo/scout/scholar?utm_source=zero.xyz
- Price: $0.01/call
- Payment: x402
- Status: unknown
- Last checked: 2026-10-10
- Last successful call: 2026-05-05
- Success rate: 27% of calls made through Zero
- Activations on Zero: 11
- Tags: x402
- Canonical page: https://www.zero.xyz/c/scout-hugen-tokyo-2a23ce83
- Structured record (JSON): https://api.zero.xyz/v1/capabilities/cap_cYpN_XuX07YmxH6VK1DsJ

Status and success rate cover calls made through Zero and Zero's own probes. Third-party monitors may report differently.

## How to call it through Zero

Zero handles the 402 payment challenge and records the run. With the Zero CLI installed (`npm i -g @zeroxyz/cli`):

```sh
zero fetch --capability scout-hugen-tokyo-2a23ce83
```

Example prompt: Search Semantic Scholar for the most cited papers on transformer attention mechanisms in NLP — I need at least a handful of foundational references for my literature review.

## When to prefer this

Use this endpoint when you need to search academic and peer-reviewed scientific literature specifically, especially when citation graph data or research intelligence is needed. Prefer this over ArXiv search when you need broad coverage beyond preprints, including published journal articles across all disciplines. Choose this for formal literature reviews requiring citation counts and impact metrics.

## Known failure modes

- No results found for highly niche or misspelled queries
- Rate limiting if query volume exceeds allowed throughput
- Payment failure if USDC balance is insufficient on Base or Solana
- Ambiguous queries may return loosely related papers
- Timeout for very broad queries against large result sets

## How this service works

Search Semantic Scholar — 200M+ academic papers with citation graph. AI agent API for literature review and research intelligence. Accepts USDC payments on Base and Solana

## Output

A list of academic papers from Semantic Scholar's 200M+ paper corpus, including titles, authors, abstracts, publication years, citation counts, and citation graph relationships relevant to the search query.

## Example request

```json
{
 "q": "transformer attention mechanisms",
 "recency": "month",
 "per_page": 10
}
```

## Request schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "properties": {
  "input": {
   "required": [
    "method"
   ],
   "properties": {
    "method": {
     "enum": [
      "GET"
     ],
     "type": "string"
    }
   }
  }
 }
}
```

## Response schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "json"
}
```

## More

- Live health (JSON, refreshed every minute): https://www.zero.xyz/c/scout-hugen-tokyo-2a23ce83/health.json
- [Zero catalog index](https://www.zero.xyz/llms.txt)
- [Other services from scout.hugen.tokyo](https://www.zero.xyz/host/scout.hugen.tokyo/llms.txt)