Primary sources are foundational to digital humanities research. Their study is a valuable part of developing critical thinking skills in students. Enhancing access to these "hidden" resources through digitization is a valuable service to scholars, students, and educators. However, merely scanning and providing full-text keyword searchability may not fully meet the needs of digital humanities scholars. Abbreviations, obsolete and regional word usage, idioms, misspellings and alternate spellings, and omissions in primary sources make keyword searching difficult. The addition of metadata in the form of normalized name headings and topics greatly enhances the research experience and saves the time of users.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.