Scite pairs an AI research assistant with Smart Citations that label how later papers cite a study, helping students, researchers, editors and organizations judge evidence before citing it.
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Scite is an AI-powered platform that helps researchers discover and evaluate scientific literature through Smart Citations, which show whether later studies support or contradict a claim. Instead of counting citations, it extracts the sentence where one paper cites another and labels that statement, then builds an assistant, a full-text search engine, citation reports, monitored collections and a manuscript checker on top of that layer.
Scite is now part of the Research Solutions family. Research Solutions, listed on Nasdaq as RSSS, announced the acquisition on November 27, 2023, and subscription questions now go to a Research Solutions support address.
Scale figures are vendor statements, and Scite's own pages do not agree with each other as captured on October 6, 2026. The features page lists 1.6B+ Smart Citations, 317M+ articles indexed, 49M+ full-text sources and 44+ publisher partners. The machine-readable site summary describes more than 315 million scholarly articles from more than 41 million full-text sources and more than 30 publisher partners, and a help-center coverage sheet cites over 1.9 billion unique citations.
Scite's deep learning model classifies each citation statement as supporting, contrasting or mentioning, so a paper shows how it has been cited rather than only how often. Labels follow the rhetorical function of the citing sentence, not positive or negative sentiment: a supporting citation can read negatively and a contrasting one can read positively.
Wrong labels can be flagged by signed-in users. Flagged classifications are reviewed by at least two subject matter experts, and Scite says it aims to correct mis-classifications in less than 24 hours.
Scite Search matches citation statements extracted from the full text, not only titles, abstracts and keywords, so findings and methods that never appear in an abstract can surface. A Scite Report shows the exact text from each citing paper and can be filtered by classification, section, year or source type.
Collections can be created from Zotero, Mendeley, a CSV of DOIs or search results; they alert you to new supporting or contrasting citations and flag retractions. Saved searches can send an email whenever new publications or new citations to the results are detected.
Reference Check takes a manuscript PDF and shows how every reference has been cited by others, including whether any have been retracted, received editorial notices or accumulated contrasting findings.
The database extends to patents, clinical trials, grants, preprints and datasets, which lets a search follow an idea from a funded proposal to a published finding to a commercial application. Subject coverage spans biomedical and natural sciences, engineering, social sciences and arts & humanities from the 1600s to the present; metadata and references update daily, while full texts are processed daily to monthly depending on the source.
These tools share one evidence layer. Smart Citation signals label how a paper has been received, the Assistant uses those same signals to ground its answers in the wider literature, and Reference Check applies them to an entire bibliography at once.
Scite is a weaker fit for anyone who needs a complete map of a field from a single index, or who wants a citation label to stand in for reading the citing paper; both limits are covered below.
Users covered by an organization license must sign up or log in at least once through the authentication method their organization provides, usually an institutional proxy or SSO; logging in with an institutional email is usually not enough.
Prices below come from Scite's plan summary, last updated August 25, 2026, and are in US dollars.
| Plan | Monthly billing | Annual billing | MCP allowance | API access |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Free | Free | 25 credits/month | Not included |
| Basic | $20/month | $144/year ($12/month) | 250 credits/month | Not included |
| Pro | $50/month | $480/year ($40/month) | 2,500 credits/month | Included |
| Team | $50/seat/month | $480/seat/year ($40/seat/month) | 2,500 credits/month/user | Included for each user |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Flexible pooled usage | Included |
Basic includes unlimited Assistant queries, Smart Citation Reports, citation alerts and the Claude and ChatGPT connectors. Collection size is the main step between individual plans: Basic holds up to 1,000 papers per collection and Pro up to 10,000, while Enterprise raises the cap to 50,000. Pro also adds patent, clinical trial and grant datasets, and the interactive pricing page currently advertises a $60 API credit with Pro for a limited time. Enterprise adds regulatory and safety datasets such as FAERS, MAUDE and FDA 510(k). Scite also offers bulk data, higher-volume API access and custom licensing, with availability and usage limits that depend on the plan and agreement.
Team pricing is presented two ways. The interactive pricing page shows $250/month including 8 seats, with $50 per month for each additional seat, while the plan summary says Team subscriptions can include up to 15 seats through self-service checkout.
Access without a subscription is also described inconsistently. An AI agent can make up to 10 requests through the Scite MCP without an account, after which a free account receives 25 MCP credits per month, but the MCP setup page states that Scite MCP requires a paid plan or free trial.
A June 2026 university library evaluation compared Scite's 41.2 million full texts and 2.8 billion citations with Undermind, which covers 200 million articles, and Consensus, with over 220 million research papers. Those figures measure corpus size rather than citation context, which is where Scite's supporting, contrasting and mentioning labels differ.
The same evaluation frames a choice inside Scite itself. Connecting the MCP to an existing AI tool brings literature search and classified citation contexts into that tool, while the scite.ai platform adds systematic literature search, customizable dashboards, full citation reports and broader discovery tools.
A free account includes 25 MCP credits per month for use inside AI assistants. The full Assistant and Search start with Basic at $20/month, and individual plans can begin with a 7-day free trial.
Scite is part of Research Solutions, a Nasdaq-listed company (RSSS) that announced the acquisition on November 27, 2023.
No. Supporting and contrasting labels describe what the citing sentence does, and they do not require that the same experiments were repeated.
Yes. The Scite MCP connects ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and other MCP-compatible tools to Smart Citations and full-text literature; in ChatGPT you type @Scite to activate it.
Yes. Students and academics can request a discount code by recommending Scite to their institution.
