A Guide to AI Tools for Research

Scite (branded as scite) is a tool which offers a quantitative and qualitative insight into how scientific publications cite each other by using access to full-text articles, citation statements, and its deep learning model to tell you, for a given publication:

• how many times it was cited by others;
• where the citation happened from each citing paper (intro, discussion, etc.);
• whether each citation offers supporting or contrasting evidence of the cited claims in the publication of interest, or simply mention it. Retractions are also detected.

Assistant by scite is a new feature (in beta) powered by Generative AI within scite. By adding ChatGPT to scite, Assistant helps users find research-backed information by querying its citation index. 

scite has dataset of over 1.2 billion Citation Statements (citation contexts indicate some span of text surrounding a citation made inside of a research article) and 187 million full-text articles we access through indexing agreements with publishers and Open Access content. This data is further linked with author, affiliation, and topic metadata and can be used for a variety of insights to support research needs. In addition, scite has over 1.9 billion unique citations. scite also provides comprehensive coverage of scholarly metadata information such as journals, publishers, and more.

Access is available on and off campus to current McMaster University students, faculty and staff with MacID. 

Access scite Here

One-Time Actions:

• Install Browser Plugin

The scite plugin delivers scite services to the webpages in the browser of your choice. Click install extension on scite homepage or look it up in the Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari extension/addon store.

• Sign Up for a Personal Account with @mcmaster.ca Email

To take advantage of personalized services, such as reference check and creating custom dashboards, sign up for a personal account with your McMaster email. 

• scite allows you to easily see how a scientific article has been cited  anywhere you’re reading it online with the widget displayed on the right of your screen.

• scite is integrated with scholarly platforms such as Google Scholar and PubMed to display citation information on scite badges.

• Search for any article within scite.ai to explore citations, get access to full text, and search & filter within citation statements. 

• scite provides larger citation counts as it indexes more open access and non-English content.

• With your personal account registered with your @mcmaster.ca email, enjoy more personlized services. 

Capabilities of scite:

• facilitates more granular tracking of citation information by categorizing citations based on their contextual relevance to a cited work, classifying them as “supporting”, “mentioning”, or “contrasting”, (known as Smart Citations). Retractions are also detected.
• available via its browser plugin that delievers scite services to where the user is reading the article, and integrated with major scholarly platforms like Google Scholar and PubMed.
• allows users to upload a manuscript and see if references have been retracted or heavily contrasted, find missing citations, or explore how others reference the same studies.  

Limitations of scite:

• includes limited grey literature, (e.g., no conference proceedings or dissertations), but does include books or book chapters when they have a DOI, and preprints.  
• its reliance on DOIs means that articles without them, such as some older publications, might not be covered. 
• accuracy in classifying citations can be low, particularly in distinguishing between the categories of “supporting” and “mentioning”.