What is Scite?
Scite is a research platform for finding and evaluating scientific literature. Its AI Assistant answers questions using scholarly research, while Smart Citations show whether later studies support, challenge, or discuss a paper or claim. Researchers, students, and industry experts can search across scholarly articles and related materials, check references, and follow citation evidence. Scite also connects with tools such as Zotero and AI assistants, and offers an API for teams building research tools.
Scite Features:
AI Assistant: Ask research questions and get answers grounded in scientific literature, with links from each claim to the specific sentence in its source paper.
Smart Citations: Review whether later research supports, challenges, or discusses a paper, claim, method, journal, author, institution, or funder.
Scholarly Search: Search within full-text scholarly articles, drawing on a database that includes licensed publisher content and the open-access corpus.
Reference Check: Upload a manuscript PDF to examine how its references have been cited, including retractions, editorial notices, and contrasting findings.
Research Coverage: Explore patents, clinical trials, grants, preprints, and datasets alongside scholarly articles to trace research across different forms of output.
Research Integrations: Use Scite through its Zotero plugin, browser extension, API, or MCP-compatible assistants, including Claude and ChatGPT.
Scite Benefits:
Faster Evidence Review: Citation context helps researchers prioritize which papers deserve closer reading instead of treating every result as equally established.
More Verifiable Answers: Sentence-level links let users check the source behind an AI-generated claim before relying on it in their work.
Stronger Citation Choices: Seeing supportive and contrasting evidence makes it easier to judge whether a finding is appropriate to cite.
Fewer Reference Surprises: Checking a manuscript's references can reveal retractions, editorial notices, or conflicting results before publication.
Less Workflow Switching: Zotero and browser access let researchers check citation context while working with their existing references or reading online.
Use Cases:
Literature Review: A graduate student mapping research on a topic can search papers and check how later studies have treated key findings.
Manuscript Preparation: An author drafting a paper can assess whether proposed references have been supported, challenged, or flagged with editorial notices.
Peer Review: A reviewer can upload a manuscript PDF and inspect the citation history of its references while evaluating the paper.
Finding Related Work: A researcher investigating a published result can follow citation context to identify papers that support or dispute it.
Research Monitoring: A team can organize and monitor papers of interest through Scite's collections while tracking relevant scholarly literature.