SemanticScholarBot

SemanticScholarBot is the web crawler for Semantic Scholar, an AI-enhanced academic search engine from the non-profit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2). The bot's function is to index scholarly literature, systematically navigating the web to identify, extract, and archive academic content, especially research publications in PDF form. It uses advanced techniques like OCR and NLP to extract critical information, such as citations and methodologies. The bot identifies itself with the user-agent string Mozilla/5.0 (compatible) SemanticScholarBot (+https://www.semanticscholar.org/crawler).

SemanticScholarBot is visiting your website because it hosts or links to academic content that is valuable for researchers. The bot specifically targets scholarly materials like research papers and conference proceedings, prioritizing academic domains, university websites, and open-access repositories. The frequency of its visits depends on the volume of new academic content on your site. The crawling is considered a legitimate and authorized activity as part of a non-profit effort to make scientific knowledge more accessible.

The purpose of SemanticScholarBot is to collect the data that powers the Semantic Scholar search engine. This service helps researchers overcome information overload by indexing millions of academic papers and making them discoverable through AI-enhanced features like semantic search and automated paper summarization. For website owners who host academic content, having your publications indexed by this bot can increase their visibility within the academic community, which can lead to more citations and a broader research impact.

To prevent SemanticScholarBot from accessing your website, you can add a specific disallow rule to your robots.txt file. This is the standard method for managing crawler access.

Add the following lines to your robots.txt file to block this bot:

User-agent: SemanticScholarBot
Disallow: /