Launching today
Cito
Hybrid academic search over 236M papers, built for agents
34 followers
Hybrid academic search over 236M papers, built for agents
34 followers
Cito is a hybrid search engine over the Semantic Scholar corpus: 236M papers in the keyword index, 146M with SPECTER2 dense vectors, fused with RRF and reranked by a cross-encoder. Free web search with no signup, a plain JSON API, and a native MCP endpoint so agents like Claude Code can run deep literature research without upstream rate limits. Built because every academic API throttled my agents to death.
Cito
The MCP endpoint is what sold me. I keep hitting the Semantic Scholar 1 req/sec wall when Claude runs a deep lit-research pass and it just stalls. Does the free 100/min hold up for a full run, or does it throttle once an agent goes wide?
Cito
@hung_tran_from_notebook_os
Short answer: it holds, and going wide is specifically the case it's built for.
The 100/min is a fixed-window counter per API key, not a pacer. There's nothing forcing a gap between calls the way S2's 1 rps does, so you can fire all 100 inside the first second and none of them stall. The window just resets.
Two things worth knowing when an agent fans out:
The limit is per key, not per connection. Ten parallel workers on one key share the same 100; they don't get 100 each.
Search is the metered part. Paper lookups aren't: /paper/batch takes up to 1000 IDs in a single call. In a real literature research pass, most of your volume is resolving and hydrating references, not issuing new queries, so the 100 tends to go a lot further than the raw number suggests. There's also /search/batch (50 queries per request), which cuts round trips, though each query still counts against the 100.
If you do have a run that genuinely needs more, ping me. The limit is a per-key value, so it can be raised for your key.