About Scite
Introduction
When conducting a literature review, it's not enough to just find papers on a topic; you need to understand how those papers have been received by the scientific community. Scite is an AI-powered research tool that helps you do just this, by showing you *how* a paper has been cited, and whether it has been supported or contradicted by subsequent research.
What is Scite?
Scite is an award-winning platform for discovering and evaluating scientific articles. Its key feature is 'Smart Citations.' For any paper, Scite analyzes the text of all the papers that have cited it and shows you whether they provide supporting or contrasting evidence. This allows you to quickly see the context of a citation and assess the reliability of a research finding.
How Scite Works
A researcher can search for a topic or a specific paper. In the results, next to each paper, Scite displays three numbers: the number of publications that support its findings, the number that mention it, and the number that provide contrasting evidence. You can then click on these numbers to see the exact text snippets from the citing papers.
Key Features and Capabilities
The platform provides 'Smart Citations,' which uses AI to classify citations as supporting, contrasting, or mentioning. It includes an 'Assistant' that can find papers and generate literature reviews. It offers a searchable database of over 1 billion citation statements. A browser extension helps you check citations as you browse the web.
Who Can Benefit from Scite?
If you're an academic researcher or a student, it is an essential tool for conducting thorough and critical literature reviews. Scientists can use it to track the conversation around their own research and that of their peers. Anyone who needs to critically evaluate scientific claims can benefit.
Pricing and Plans
Scite operates on a freemium model. A free plan is available that allows you to see the citation counts for articles. To see the full text of the citation statements and to use the more advanced features, you need to subscribe to a paid plan. Discounted plans are available for students.
Pros and Cons
What We Like
The Smart Citations feature is a game-changer for critical literature review and understanding the scientific conversation. It helps to quickly identify supporting and contradicting evidence for a claim. The platform is a powerful tool for fighting misinformation.
Areas for Improvement
The full power of the platform is only available on the paid subscription plan. The database is focused on the formal scientific literature and does not include other sources like news or social media.
Getting Started with Scite
Sign up for a free account on the Scite.ai website. Install the browser extension. Then, as you browse for academic papers on sites like Google Scholar or a journal's website, the Scite extension will show you the Smart Citation data for each paper, giving you instant context on its findings.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How does the AI know if a citation is 'supporting' or 'contrasting'?</p
A: The AI has been trained on a massive dataset of scientific papers. It analyzes the language and the context of the sentence where the citation appears. For example, sentences that include phrases like 'our results are in agreement with...' are classified as supporting, while phrases like 'however, in contrast to...' are classified as contrasting.
Q: Can it write a literature review for me?</p
A: The Scite Assistant is a generative AI feature that can help you find relevant papers and can generate drafts of literature reviews based on a research question, which is a powerful feature of the paid plans.