scite is an AI-powered research platform that helps researchers, students, librarians, and evaluators discover and assess scientific literature with confidence. Instead of returning citation counts or unsourced answers, scite grounds every result in real peer-reviewed papers and shows how each finding has been treated by later research, so users can judge the weight of evidence behind a claim rather than just how often it has been cited.
How It Works
At the core of the platform are Smart Citations. For each citation, scite extracts the surrounding sentence and classifies it as supporting, contrasting, or mentioning the cited claim. This lets users see the context in which a paper was cited and whether subsequent work confirmed or challenged its conclusions. The same analysis can be applied to a single paper, a journal, an author, an institution, or a funder, turning raw citation activity into a clearer signal of reliability.
Key Features
- Smart Citations: Every citation is classified as supporting, contrasting, or mentioning, with the surrounding sentence shown in context.
- Evidence-grounded AI Assistant: Answers are linked back to the specific sentence in the specific paper they came from, so claims can be verified in one click rather than re-checked.
- Full-text search: Search goes beyond abstracts across a large licensed corpus of full-text articles, preprints, books, patents, and datasets.
- Citation reports and alerts: Track how a paper has been cited over time and receive alerts when new citations appear.
- Collections and dashboards: Organize papers into collections and build custom dashboards to monitor topics, authors, or institutions.
Coverage and Data
scite is built on a large licensed database of scholarly content, drawing on direct agreements with publishers such as Wiley and SAGE alongside the open access corpus. Its index spans hundreds of millions of scholarly sources and well over a billion citations, extending beyond journal articles to patents, clinical trials, grants, preprints, and datasets so users can trace an idea from funded proposal to published finding.
Use Cases
- Conducting faster, more reliable literature reviews grounded in verifiable evidence.
- Checking whether a specific finding has been supported or contradicted before relying on it.
- Evaluating the credibility of papers, journals, authors, or institutions for research assessment.
- Monitoring how one's own published work is being cited and discussed.
Integrations
scite is designed to fit existing research workflows. It runs inside Claude, ChatGPT, and other MCP-compatible assistants, integrates with the Zotero reference manager, and is available through an API for teams building their own tools.
Plans and Pricing
scite offers a free trial and tiered subscriptions. The Basic plan is aimed at individual use, the Pro plan targets power researchers with higher usage limits and additional datasets, and Team plans add centralized billing and shared collections for groups. Enterprise plans provide unlimited users, API access, SSO, and flexible institutional access for universities, libraries, and organizations. scite is now part of Research Solutions.
