Scite review
7.1/10★★★★★Research assistant whose Smart Citations show if findings were supported or contradicted
- Best for
- Researchers who need to check whether the evidence behind a claim holds up
- Price
- Free trial · from $20/month
Free: 7-day free trial; no free plan - Platforms
- Web, Chrome extension, API
- Made by
- Scite LLC (Research Solutions), Henderson, USA
What it is
Scite reads across more than 300 million full-text articles, preprints, patents and datasets, using licensing deals with over 40 publishers. Its Smart Citations classify 1.6 billion citations by whether later research supports or contradicts a finding, and its Assistant answers questions grounded in that literature.
What the AI does
- AI Assistant grounded in full-text scholarly articles
- Smart Citations (supporting, contrasting, mentioning)
- Reference Check for manuscripts
- MCP server to connect AI agents
- Citation alerts and dashboards
Pros and cons
- Unique view of whether findings were later supported or disputed
- Reads full text from licensed publisher content, not just abstracts
- Zotero plugin, browser extension and MCP integrations
- No free plan, only a 7-day trial
- Coverage depends on publisher agreements
- Less help with writing reports than newer agents
How it scores
Unmatched for checking citation context; narrower as an all-round assistant and has no free plan.
Feature checklist · 4 of 9
- Searches a large database of academic papers (yes)
- Answers from your own uploaded PDFs and documents (no)
- Inline citations linked to the exact source (yes)
- Multi-step deep research reports (no)
- Extracts details from papers into tables (no)
- Shows whether studies support or contradict a claim (yes)
- Discovers related papers through citations or recommendations (no)
- Exports citations or connects to Zotero (yes)
- Useful free plan (no)
Alternatives
See all Scite alternatives, ranked →
- Gemini Notebook 8.8/10Students and researchers who already have their sources and want to understand, question and summarise them
- Perplexity 8.4/10Fast cited overviews of a topic across the web and academic sources
- Consensus 8.3/10Students, clinicians and anyone checking what the research says about a specific question
- ChatGPT deep research 8.0/10Professionals who want a thorough written briefing on a complex topic