Scite shows you not just how many times a paper has been cited — but whether subsequent research supported, contradicted, or simply mentioned its findings. Built on 1.2 billion citation contexts. Essential before citing any important paper. Basic: ~$12/month. Institutional pricing available.
Citation Intelligence1.2B citation contextsSmart Citations~$12/monthLast reviewed: April 2026
What is Scite?
Scite is a research tool that analyses how academic papers cite each other in context. Traditional citation counts tell you a paper was cited 500 times. Scite tells you: 400 times papers supported its findings, 80 times they contradicted it, 20 times they simply mentioned it. This is called Smart Citations, and it fundamentally changes how you evaluate a paper's reliability.
A paper with high citation count looks authoritative. If 20% of those citations are contradictions, that context matters enormously — especially in fast-moving fields like medicine, nutrition and psychology where early findings are frequently revised. Scite makes this information visible. Without it, you might cite a paper that the subsequent literature has substantially undermined.
Scite has analysed over 1.2 billion citation statements across 200 million academic sources, per the official Scite website. It has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, reflecting its value to serious academic research infrastructure.
Who Scite is for
Researchers who need to evaluate the reliability of specific papers before citing them. Healthcare and clinical researchers checking whether a study's findings have held up. Graduate students building a literature review who need to assess evidence quality. Science journalists checking whether a widely-cited finding is still considered valid. Anyone for whom the reliability of a specific paper's claims matters.
Scite is a verification and evaluation tool, not a discovery tool. Use Elicit or Semantic Scholar to find papers, then use Scite to assess how those papers have been received by subsequent research.
Getting started
Go to scite.ai. Create an account — a limited free tier allows basic searches. Search for any paper by title, DOI or keywords. The Smart Citation dashboard shows: total citations, supporting citations (green), contrasting citations (red), and mentioning citations (grey). Click through to read the actual citation contexts — the sentences from citing papers that reference this work.
12 Scite workflows
Pre-citation check
Before citing a key paper: search it on Scite. Check the supporting vs contrasting ratio. If contrasting citations are high (over 15–20%), read several of the contrasting statements to understand what has been disputed. Decide whether to still cite, cite with a caveat, or find a more recent and better-supported study.
Evaluate a foundational study
You are building on a paper published 5–10 years ago. Search it on Scite. A high proportion of supporting citations suggests the field considers its findings robust. A growing number of contrasting citations in recent years suggests the findings may be under revision.
Track a retracted or disputed finding
Some high-profile findings have been substantially contradicted but continue to be cited. Search any influential paper you are considering citing. Check whether recent citing papers are supportive or contrasting. This is especially important in nutrition, psychology and medicine where replication failures have been common.
Find papers that contradict a claim
You need to understand the counterevidence against [finding]. Search the original paper on Scite. Click 'Contrasting' to see only the papers that contradict it. Read the citation contexts. This gives you the specific objections the literature has raised, with references.
Assess a systematic review
Before using a systematic review as your primary evidence source: check it on Scite. Systematic reviews should have mostly supporting citations (confirming their synthesis was sound) and few contrasting ones. A systematic review with many contrasting citations suggests its conclusions have been disputed.
Research question: where is evidence contested?
Run Scite's Assistant: 'What does the research say about [intervention] for [outcome]? Where is there significant disagreement between studies?' The Assistant synthesises citation contexts to identify the specific sub-questions where findings are most contested.
Check a widely-shared claim
A claim is circulating widely — in media, on social platforms, in policy documents — citing [paper]. Search that paper on Scite. If contrasting citations are high, the original claim may be overstated relative to what the subsequent literature supports. You now have the evidence to qualify the claim accurately.
Zotero integration
Install the Scite Zotero plugin. When you add papers to your Zotero library, Scite automatically adds Smart Citation data alongside each reference. You see the supporting/contrasting ratio directly in your reference manager while writing. This makes evidence quality assessment part of your normal citation workflow.
Dashboard for a paper set
Create a Scite dashboard for a set of papers you are reviewing. Scite aggregates the Smart Citation data across all papers and shows you: which papers in your set are most well-supported, which are most contested, and the overall evidence quality profile of your reading list.
Identify the strongest papers in a field
Search your topic on Scite. Sort by supporting citation ratio (not raw citation count). Papers with high citation counts AND high support ratios are the most robustly supported findings in the field — a better measure of evidence quality than citation count alone.
Monitor a paper over time
Set a Scite alert for key papers in your area. When new papers cite them — whether supporting or contrasting — you get notified. This keeps you current on how the evidence base for your core citations is evolving without checking manually.
Clinical decision support
Before recommending a treatment based on a study: check it on Scite. In clinical contexts, a paper with high contrasting citations may indicate the treatment recommendation has been revised. Always pair Scite with clinical guideline sources — Scite shows the research landscape, not clinical guidance.
Tips
Read the citation contexts, not just the counts. The supporting/contrasting ratio is the starting point. The real value is reading the actual sentences from citing papers. A paper might have 10 contrasting citations all making the same narrow methodological criticism — which is different from 10 contrasting citations challenging the core finding.
Use with Zotero for seamless integration. The Scite Zotero plugin adds Smart Citation data to every paper in your library. This makes evidence quality assessment automatic rather than manual.
Technical background
Scite was founded in 2017 and has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, per the Scite official website. Its Smart Citations system has analysed over 1.2 billion citation statements across 200 million sources. Scite uses natural language processing to classify citation contexts into supporting, contrasting or mentioning categories — a classification task that required building training datasets of annotated citation contexts across multiple scientific domains.
The Scite Assistant feature uses the citation context database to answer research questions, grounding answers in how papers actually discuss each other's findings rather than in the papers' own abstracts.
Pricing (verified April 2026)
Free: Limited searches and citation views
Basic: ~$12/month — full Smart Citations access, Zotero plugin, dashboards
Institutional: Contact sales — site licences for universities and research institutions