Scite: Smart Citations, Data Sources and Publishers
Scite reads full-text papers from publisher agreements and open access content and labels citations as supporting, contrasting or mentioning.
Scite is a research platform that shows how scientific papers cite each other and labels each citation as supporting, contrasting or mentioning. It reads full texts from publisher agreements and open access content, and it documents no web crawler. Content gets into Scite through publishers and journals, not through a website.
Who runs Scite
Scite is now part of Research Solutions. The Scite website footer says this and gives [email protected] as the contact address.
How Scite builds its index
The help article How does Scite work? explains the process. Scite gets full-text PDFs and XML files through indexing agreements with publishers and other sources, such as preprint servers. It then finds each place where one paper cites another and extracts the text around the citation.
The Scite Coverage article adds these points:
- The full texts come from indexing agreements with publishers and from open access content.
- A journal must be registered with Crossref or DataCite, with working DOIs and an active ISSN, before Scite indexes it.
- Metadata and references update daily. Full texts update daily to monthly, depending on the source.
Scite says that its homepage shows the current counts. In October 2026, the homepage named direct agreements with Wiley, SAGE and more than 42 other publishers.
How Smart Citations work
A Smart Citation is a citation with its surrounding text and a label. A deep learning model sets the label by what the citation does, not by positive or negative words (source).
| Label | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Supporting | The citing paper gives evidence that supports the cited work |
| Contrasting | The citing paper gives evidence against the cited work |
| Mentioning | The citing paper mentions the work without evidence for or against it |
Scite Assistant answers research questions from the scholarly literature and links each citation to its source. Scite also offers an API and an MCP server, so other AI tools can use its data. MCP is a standard way to connect tools to AI assistants (llms.txt).
For publishers and site owners
- Scite documents no web crawler, user agent or robots.txt token.
- If an article or a citation is missing, Scite gives these main causes (source). Scite did not process the article yet, the extraction from a PDF failed, or Scite has no agreement with the publisher.
- If you publish a journal and want it indexed, write to [email protected] about a partnership.
For other research search tools, see Semantic Scholar and Consensus.