Question 1

Writing a paper with scite

Accepted Answer

In this guide, we will teach you how to use scite to write a term paper including:

Search Literature with scite Advanced Search, Citation Statement Search & the Assistant tool
Evaluate research papers with scite Reports
Write a paper and find citations and references using the tools introduced above

Searching Literature with scite

A professor assigns a term paper. What’s your first step?

For most students, the answer is a literature search - looking up scholarly papers on the topic. In this brief guide, we’ll walk you through how scite can help you not only find articles, but how to use it to help you write your paper quickly and efficiently.

Let’s say you are writing a paper on Ego Depletion - the idea that human willpower is a limited resource that can be depleted.

First, you will want to use the scite search features to find relevant articles. There are two primary ways you can search with scite:

searching for papers by their titles, abstracts and other metadata (scite Advanced Search)
searching for papers by searching inside of papers directly (scite Citation Statement Search)
asking simple questions and synthesizing information from research articles to support your research tasks (scite Assistant Tool)

Searching For Papers by Title, Abstract, etc. (scite Advanced Search)

With scite, you can discover papers by whether they have been supported or contrasted by other authors. You will want to ensure t

Question 2

Using scite for literature reviews and critical analysis

Accepted Answer

Using scite to speed up literature reviews and critical analysis 🚀

Literature reviews and critical analyses take time. In order to write high quality research you need to engage with the literature, read the references being cited, read the citations to the paper and make sure you understand the field as a whole. Collecting and reading all relevant references and citations takes a long time. scite helps you spending less time on research and writing while simultaneously boosting the quality of your work by presenting what is said about a paper right away.

scite helps with some of the major aspects of performing literature reviews and critical analysis including: critically engaging with publications, understanding how a publication and its results have been cited, and finding relevant literature on the topic in question. Finally, for many researchers, the purpose of understanding previous work is not only to position your current reseach but also to identify and clearly explain the gaps in research that your work will address. scite helps you find research gaps.

By using scite to understand literature, it will be easier for you to contribute to a more in-depth and broad discussion about differences in results and arugments and identify complex ideas in the literature to surface them in your writing.

This guide will help you learn:

How to use scite to find relevant journals, authors, literature, and specific results or claims
How to use

Question 3

How are citations classified?

Accepted Answer

| Citations are classified by a deep learning model that is trained to identify three categories of citation statements: those that provide contrasting or supporting evidence for the cited work, and others, which mention the cited study without providing evidence for its validity.

Citations are classified by rhetorical function, not positive or negative sentiment.
Citations are not classified as supporting or contrasting by positive or negative keywords.
A Suppporting citation can have a negative sentiement and a Contrasting citation can have a positive sentiement. Sentiment and rhetorical function are not correlated.
Supporting and Contrasting citations do not necessarily indicate that the exact set of experiments were performed. For example, if a paper finds that drug X causes phenomenon Y in mice and a subsequent paper finds that drug X causes phenomenon Y in yeast but both come to this conclusion with different experiments—this would be classified as a supporting citation, even though identical experiments were not performed.
Citations that simply use the same method, reagent, or software are not classified as supporting. To identify methods citations, you can filter by the section.

For full technical details including exactly how we do classification, what classifications and classification confidence means please read our recent publication describing how scite was built: https://doi.org/10.1162/qssa00146

A few examples:

Supporting citatio

Question 4

How do I make and use Custom Dashboards?

Accepted Answer

**“Ooooh. What else can I do with all this data?” - Probably some researcher

This article will cover:

What Custom Dashboards are
How you can make one
What information is conveyed in the dashboard
Example workflow creating a custom dashboard from search results

It also assumes that you:

Understand what Smart Citations are and how they are classified (See: How does scite work?)

Custom Dashboards

Custom Dashboards are a way of aggregating scite specific Smart Citation data about groups of papers. You can for example see:

How many total supporting, contrasting, and mentioning citations they have received
How many editorial notices they have received
The trends in the scite Index over time for these papers
All of the articles in a table that is sortable and filterable by their citation metrics

It is worth emphasizing that:

Users on a free plan are allowed one custom dashboard with up to 100 DOIs.
Users on a premium plan are allowed an infinite amount of custom dashboards with up to 1,000 DOIs each.
The limit of the number of DOIs is configurable but we ask that you reach out to us to request custom limits so we can better understand your use-case.

Okay… how do I make one?

Custom dashboards can be made by navigating to the Product tab and clicking on Create Dashboard.

There are currently four ways you can make a custom dashboard:

Importing your Zotero library
Importing your Mendeley library

Question 5

How does Citation Statement Search work?

Accepted Answer

Citation Statements (sometimes known as citances) are the sentences surrounding a citation or reference within a publication.

For example, the following is a citation statement from Neighborhood Change and Crime in the Modern Metropolis Kirk and Laub (2010) to Crack, Cocaine and Heroin: Drug Eras in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1960-2000 Curtis (2003)

Yet, this accessibility contributed to gentrification in the 1980s. As Curtis (2003) observes, residents displaced from Manhattan in the mid-1980s because of rising rents flocked to nearby Williamsburg. Many boarded-up buildings and abandoned industrial areas, some of which were used as "shooting galleries" and drug stashes, were transformed into lofts and condos for gentrifiers.

With scite Citation Statment Search you are able to search our entire database of citation statements which numbers almost 1 billion citation statements. Using Citation Statement search allows you to search for how anything was mentioned in the scholarly literature from datasets, methods, protocols, assets, and research products to specific results, claims, and arguments.

For example, if you are interested in a particular fact you might search "Rate of chromosome missegregation in HeLa Cells" and get the following results:

Finding the rate of chromosome missegregation in HeLa Cells

How to interpret search results?

The search results are citatio

Question 6

How can I use scite advanced search?

Accepted Answer

With scite you can search over 100M publications to find how research is being talked about, and whether citing publications are providing support or have different results than the cited work. By using scite search you will not only be able to find the highest quality research but you will be able to easily see gaps, methodological flaws, differing results, and other issues pointed out by other authors.

Basic Search

Like other literature search tools, you can search by title, abstract, digital object identifier (DOI), keywords, author name, year, journal, and more. You can use the scite search box as well as the advanced search boxes to search for these. The top search box will search across all of our search fields. If there is a search field that you feel is missing and wish for us to add don't hesitate to contact us.

We also support enclosing phrases in quotations in any field for an exact match.

Advanced Search

Scite supports standard boolean search using "AND", "OR", "NOT".

Brackets "(" and ")" can be used for grouping and quotes "" can be used for exact matches of particular words or phrases.

Wildcard searches can be run on individual terms, using ? to replace a single character, for example "behavio?r" and * to replace zero or more characters, for example "lang*".

Fuzzy matching can be used by adding a tilde (~N) to the en

Frequently Read Articles

Browse All Categories