# SciSpace API

> REST API for scholarly search, document understanding, extraction and grounded answers over 280M+ works.

Every page is available as Markdown by appending `.md` to its URL.

## Welcome

- [Introduction](https://docs.scispace.com/introduction.md): The SciSpace API turns a research question into an answer you can check. Every sentence it returns carries a citation into the 280M+ works in the corpus — down to the page, and the
- [What you can build](https://docs.scispace.com/what-you-can-build.md): Five concrete products, each with the endpoints it needs and a link to the guide that builds it.

## Get started

- [Quickstart](https://docs.scispace.com/get-started/quickstart.md): Get a cited answer to a research question in under five minutes.
- [Authentication](https://docs.scispace.com/get-started/authentication.md): Every request carries a secret API key as a bearer token over HTTPS. Requests without a valid key return 401 with error.type: authentication_error.
- [API keys](https://docs.scispace.com/get-started/api-keys.md): Create, scope, rotate, and revoke keys from Settings → API keys.
- [Environments](https://docs.scispace.com/get-started/environments.md): Test and live keys address the same endpoints, the same corpus, and the same models. The difference is billing, throughput, and retention — not behaviour.
- [Your first request](https://docs.scispace.com/get-started/first-request.md): A slower walkthrough than quickstart, explaining every part of the call. Use this page if the quickstart worked but you want to know why.
- [Errors and retries](https://docs.scispace.com/get-started/errors-and-retries.md): Every error returns the same envelope. Branch on error.code, never on message — messages change, codes are part of the compatibility contract.
- [Client libraries](https://docs.scispace.com/get-started/client-libraries.md)

## Concepts

- [Data model overview](https://docs.scispace.com/concepts/overview.md): Twelve objects. Learn these four and the rest follow: Paper, Document, Search, Citation.
- [Paper](https://docs.scispace.com/concepts/paper.md): A paper is a scholarly work in the SciSpace corpus, identified by a pap_ ID and usually a DOI. You do not create papers; you look them up and reference them.
- [Document](https://docs.scispace.com/concepts/document.md): A document is a PDF you uploaded, parsed and ready for questions and extraction. Private to your account, deletable, and metered on ingest.
- [Library](https://docs.scispace.com/concepts/library.md): A library groups documents and carries access permissions. Every organization has a default library; creating more is optional.
- [Search](https://docs.scispace.com/concepts/search.md): A search is one literature query over the corpus, run at a chosen depth. It produces an Answer and the ranked papers that answer is grounded in.
- [Answer](https://docs.scispace.com/concepts/answer.md): An answer is generated prose plus the citations that support it. It is never a bare string.
- [Citation](https://docs.scispace.com/concepts/citation.md): A citation links a span of generated text to the source it came from — with the quoted evidence and, for PDFs, the exact region on the page. This is the object that makes output ch
- [Extraction schema](https://docs.scispace.com/concepts/extraction-schema.md): An extraction schema is the set of fields you want pulled out of every document — the column definitions of the table you are building.
- [Chat](https://docs.scispace.com/concepts/chat.md): A chat is a conversation scoped to a fixed set of documents and/or papers. The scope is set at creation and does not drift.
- [Message](https://docs.scispace.com/concepts/message.md): A message is one turn in a Chat. User turns carry text; assistant turns carry an Answer.
- [Job](https://docs.scispace.com/concepts/job.md): A job is the async execution behind a resource. There is one status vocabulary across the whole API, so you write the wait logic once.
- [Webhook](https://docs.scispace.com/concepts/webhook.md): A webhook delivers an event to your endpoint when an async job finishes, so you do not have to poll. Use them for anything that routinely takes more than 30 seconds — above all dee
- [Depth](https://docs.scispace.com/concepts/depth.md): Depth is how much effort to spend on a request. It is the only quality dial, and it never names a model — internal models can change without breaking your integration.
- [Credit](https://docs.scispace.com/concepts/credit.md): A credit is the unit of metering. Every metered response reports what it cost and what remains.
- [Rate limit](https://docs.scispace.com/concepts/rate-limit.md): A rate limit caps throughput. It is separate from credits: credits limit how much you may spend, rate limits how fast you may spend it.
- [Topic](https://docs.scispace.com/concepts/topic.md): A topic is a concept extracted across the literature for a query, with the evidence that supports it — the ideas behind the papers rather than the papers themselves.
- [File](https://docs.scispace.com/concepts/file.md): A file is the upload primitive. You create a file, then turn it into a Document — and exports hand you a file back.

## API reference

- [Reference overview](https://docs.scispace.com/api-reference/overview.md): Base URL https://api.scispace.com/v1. Read conventions once; it covers auth, pagination, idempotency, versioning, and headers so the resource pages do not repeat them.
- [Conventions](https://docs.scispace.com/api-reference/conventions.md): Everything true of every endpoint. Resource pages link here instead of restating it.
- [Searches](https://docs.scispace.com/api-reference/searches.md): Answer a research question over the corpus, with citations and the ranked papers behind the answer.
- [Papers](https://docs.scispace.com/api-reference/papers.md): Look up scholarly metadata, full text where licensing allows, and citation graph edges.
- [Documents](https://docs.scispace.com/api-reference/documents.md): Ingest your own PDFs so you can chat with them and extract from them.
- [Chats](https://docs.scispace.com/api-reference/chats.md): Ask questions about a fixed set of documents and papers, and get answers with page-level citations.
- [Extractions](https://docs.scispace.com/api-reference/extractions.md): Run a field schema over many documents or papers and get a table back, with a citation per cell.
- [Paraphrases](https://docs.scispace.com/api-reference/paraphrases.md): Rewrite academic text with control over tone, length, and how far the wording may drift.
- [AI detections](https://docs.scispace.com/api-reference/ai-detections.md): Assess how likely a passage was machine-generated, sentence by sentence.
- [Topics](https://docs.scispace.com/api-reference/topics.md): Extract the concepts that matter for a query, each with the evidence behind it.
- [Citations](https://docs.scispace.com/api-reference/citations.md): Format bibliography entries and in-text citations in over 2,000 journal styles.
- [Files](https://docs.scispace.com/api-reference/files.md): Upload inputs and download exports.
- [Jobs](https://docs.scispace.com/api-reference/jobs.md): One endpoint to check the state of any async resource.
- [Webhook endpoints](https://docs.scispace.com/api-reference/webhook-endpoints.md): Register HTTPS URLs to receive completion events.
- [Usage](https://docs.scispace.com/api-reference/usage.md): Credit balance and consumption, broken down by day, endpoint, and key. Free to call.

## SDKs

- [Overview](https://docs.scispace.com/sdks/overview.md)
- [Python](https://docs.scispace.com/sdks/python.md)
- [TypeScript](https://docs.scispace.com/sdks/typescript.md)
- [REST](https://docs.scispace.com/sdks/rest.md): Everything the SDKs do, done by hand. Use this page if your language has no SDK.

## Guides

- [Build a literature review agent](https://docs.scispace.com/guides/literature-review-agent.md): Outcome: a loop that takes a research question, searches at increasing depth, screens the papers, and returns a cited summary your users can verify.
- [Extract data from a batch of PDFs](https://docs.scispace.com/guides/batch-extraction.md): Outcome: a CSV with one row per paper and a citation for every cell, built from a folder of PDFs.
- [Ground an LLM answer in real citations](https://docs.scispace.com/guides/grounded-answers.md): Outcome: answers in your product where every claim links to a source the user can open and check.
- [Stream a long-running deep review](https://docs.scispace.com/guides/streaming-deep-review.md): Outcome: a deep review that shows progress in the UI instead of a spinner that times out.
- [Render citation highlights in your own viewer](https://docs.scispace.com/guides/citation-highlights.md): Outcome: clicking a citation scrolls your PDF viewer to the exact sentence and draws a highlight over it.
- [Sync results to a reference manager](https://docs.scispace.com/guides/reference-manager-sync.md): Outcome: search results land in Zotero, Mendeley, or EndNote as proper references.
- [Migrate from OpenAlex or Semantic Scholar](https://docs.scispace.com/guides/migrate-from-openalex.md): Outcome: your existing metadata pipeline keeps working, with grounded answers added on top.
- [Control cost and credits](https://docs.scispace.com/guides/cost-control.md): Outcome: predictable spend at scale, with no surprise 402s in production.

## Integrations

- [Overview](https://docs.scispace.com/integrations/overview.md): Four supported integration paths. Anything not listed here is a plain REST call — see reference-overview.
- [LangChain and LlamaIndex](https://docs.scispace.com/integrations/langchain-llamaindex.md): Use SciSpace as a retriever so an existing RAG application gains scholarly grounding.
- [Claude and OpenAI tool use](https://docs.scispace.com/integrations/tool-use.md): Expose SciSpace endpoints as tools so an agent can research on demand.
- [Zotero and Mendeley](https://docs.scispace.com/integrations/reference-managers.md): Move search results and bibliographies into a reference manager.
- [Zapier](https://docs.scispace.com/integrations/zapier.md)

## Platform

- [Rate limits and quotas](https://docs.scispace.com/platform/rate-limits.md): Requests are limited per API key. Exceeding a limit returns 429 with Retry-After in seconds.
- [Pricing and credits](https://docs.scispace.com/platform/pricing-and-credits.md): API usage is metered in credits. Every metered response reports its cost in X-Credits-Cost.
- [Versioning and deprecation](https://docs.scispace.com/platform/versioning.md): The path pins the major version; a dated header pins behaviour within it.
- [Content licensing and permitted use](https://docs.scispace.com/platform/content-licensing.md): What you may do with the scholarly content this API returns.
- [Data privacy and retention](https://docs.scispace.com/platform/data-privacy.md): What happens to the content you send us, and for how long.
- [Security and compliance](https://docs.scispace.com/platform/security-compliance.md)
- [Reliability and status](https://docs.scispace.com/platform/reliability.md)
- [Teams, keys and scopes](https://docs.scispace.com/platform/teams-and-scopes.md): Access has two layers: roles control what a person can do in the dashboard, scopes control what a key can do against the API.

## Support

- [FAQ](https://docs.scispace.com/support/faq.md): Ordered by expected frequency, not by topic.
- [Troubleshooting](https://docs.scispace.com/support/troubleshooting.md): Symptoms, causes, fixes. Every row names a status code or error code where one exists.
- [Changelog](https://docs.scispace.com/support/changelog.md)
- [Beta program](https://docs.scispace.com/support/beta-program.md): The SciSpace API is in public beta. Signup is self-serve — no waitlist, no sales call.
- [Get support](https://docs.scispace.com/support/get-support.md)