Scite is an AI-powered research platform built to help researchers, students, authors, and institutions evaluate scholarly literature. Instead of counting how often a paper has been cited, it shows whether later studies actually supported, contradicted, or simply mentioned that paper’s findings.
Traditional citation counts tell you volume, not validity. That leaves researchers exposed to disputed methods, unverified claims, or literature that has since been retracted. Scite addresses this by extracting full citation sentences from academic articles and classifying them with deep learning models.
The platform runs on an index of over 300 million scholarly sources and 1.6 billion Smart Citations. It includes an AI research assistant grounded in that index, a full-text citation search engine, an automated manuscript reference checker, and tools for monitoring paper collections over time. Answers and reports link back to the exact sentence and DOI in the source paper.
Scite LLC is a subsidiary of Research Solutions. The platform reports over 2 million users and direct licensing agreements with more than 35 academic publishers, letting it search inside paywalled full text without exposing protected content.
Pricing
Scite’s free Connect plan costs $0/month and includes 25 Model Context Protocol (MCP) credits monthly for tools like ChatGPT and Claude, but it excludes web access to Scite Assistant and Search. The Basic plan is $20/month billed annually and adds full Assistant and Search access, 250 MCP credits, and Collections up to 1,000 papers. Pro is $50/month billed annually and adds API access, 2,500 MCP credits, Collections up to 10,000 papers, and patent, clinical trial, and grant datasets. A separate Team plan runs around $50 per seat per month for roughly 15 to 20 seats, while larger institutional or corporate Enterprise deployments use custom quotes. Paid plans include a 7-day free trial that automatically converts to a paid subscription unless canceled first.
* Disclaimer: Please note that pricing information may not be up to date. For the most accurate and current pricing details, refer to the official website.
Key Features
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Smart Citations classify each citation as supporting, contrasting, or mentioning
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Scite Assistant answers questions grounded in 300M+ scholarly sources
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Full-text citation search goes beyond titles and abstracts
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Reference Check audits manuscript bibliographies for retractions
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Collections monitor and track citation updates for up to 10,000 papers
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Native MCP integration connects Scite data to Claude and ChatGPT
Use Cases
Literature Review and Evidence Synthesis
Researchers and graduate students use Scite Search and Assistant to see whether claims in a field are widely supported or contested. Citation statements are grouped automatically, so users can gauge consensus without reading hundreds of full papers.
Manuscript Bibliography Auditing
Authors preparing papers for submission upload a manuscript PDF to Reference Check. It flags any citation that has been retracted, received an editorial notice, or accumulated significant contrasting findings.
AI Grounding via MCP
Developers connect the Scite MCP server to Claude or ChatGPT to query scholarly literature directly inside a chat session. This helps ground AI responses in peer-reviewed sources rather than invented citations.
Institutional Research Monitoring
Research administrators build Collections of institutional papers to track citation growth and the balance of supporting versus contrasting citations. Alerts notify them when an affiliated paper is cited or retracted.
Patent and Technology Transfer Analysis
IP professionals and R&D managers trace how academic discoveries evolve into patents. Linked datasets across grants, preprints, articles, clinical trials, and patents let analysts map an innovation from funding to filing.
Strengths & Weaknesses
Strengths
Indexes over 1.6 billion Smart Citations across 300M+ scholarly sources, patents, and clinical trials.
Classifies citation context as supporting or contrasting instead of relying on raw citation counts.
Direct licensing with 35+ publishers enables full-text search inside paywalled literature.
Reference Check flags retracted or contested citations before manuscript submission.
Every Assistant answer links to the exact sentence and DOI it was drawn from.
Weaknesses
The free Connect plan excludes Scite Assistant and Search, the platform’s core web tools.
Full web access requires a paid subscription starting at $20/month after the trial ends.
Collections are capped at 1,000 papers per collection on the entry-level Basic plan.
MCP usage across every tier is metered by fixed monthly credit quotas.
Who Is This For?
Academic and clinical researchers who need to check whether a study’s findings have been supported or contradicted by later work.
Students and PhD candidates writing theses or literature reviews who want to gauge research consensus faster.
Peer reviewers, editors, and academic authors who need to screen manuscripts for retracted or disputed citations before publication.
Corporate R&D and patent analysts who trace how academic research feeds into applied and commercial development.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Scite and how is it different from a citation index?
Scite extracts full-text citation statements and classifies each one as supporting, contrasting, or mentioning a claim, using deep learning. Standard citation indexes only count citation volume, without judging context.
Is there a free version of Scite?
Yes. The Connect plan is free and includes 25 MCP credits per month for use inside tools like Claude and ChatGPT. It does not include web access to Scite Assistant or Search.
What happens after the free trial ends?
The 7-day free trial covers full Basic or Pro features. It automatically converts to a paid subscription on the selected plan unless canceled before it ends.
Can Scite search content behind publisher paywalls?
Yes. Direct licensing agreements with more than 35 publishers let Scite index paywalled full text, showing citation context and snippets without exposing the protected full article.
Does Scite offer a Team plan for small groups?
Yes. A Team plan is priced at roughly $50 per seat per month for around 15 to 20 seats, separate from custom-quoted Enterprise deployments for larger organizations.
Are there student or academic discounts?
Yes. Students and academics can get a discount code by recommending Scite to their institution and emailing sales@scite.ai and customersupport@researchsolutions.com.
How does Scite Assistant avoid making up citations?
Scite Assistant generates answers only from its indexed scholarly sources. Each answer includes clickable inline citations linked to the specific sentence and DOI of the underlying paper.
Does Scite offer API access?
API access is included on the Pro plan, which also comes with a limited-time one-time $60 API credit. Basic and Connect plans do not include API access.
What reference managers does Scite work with?
Scite integrates with Zotero through a dedicated plugin and supports importing references from Mendeley or CSV files into Collections for monitoring.
Who is Scite best suited for?
It is best suited for researchers, students, authors, editors, and R&D or patent analysts who need to evaluate evidence rather than just count citations.
Scite integrates through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), letting AI tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, and Cursor query its literature database directly. A REST API provides programmatic access to metadata, citation tallies, and reference checks on the Pro plan. Scite Holdings connects institutional library subscriptions for full-text access, a Zotero plugin brings Smart Citation data into that reference manager, and a free browser extension adds citation badges to Google Scholar and PubMed. Embeddable JavaScript badges let publishers display live Smart Citation tallies on their own sites.