A doctor working in Malaysia with refugees and asylum seekers is confronted with various questions and issues from his patients on a day-to-day basis. Some patients feel that the doctors are not treating them well, others have problems with understanding the language or simply live too far away from the clinic to come regularly. Primarily working with patients who are pregnant, the doctor wants to better understand the feedback and make sense of the various barriers to accessing care that patients are facing.

The doctor first asks his colleague if this is a common challenge for patients in rural areas and is directed to the seminal study, “Too far to walk: maternal mortality in context.” He reads the study, finding it compelling he wonders if anyone has done any related work in Malaysia. Given the paper has over fifteen hundred citations, he knows he can’t open all citing papers and read them. He opens the scite report for the study and despite being able to see how those articles have been cited through the citation context, he knows that reading 2,044 citation statements is still too much.

By filtering the citation statements for those with the keyword “Malaysia", he quickly finds supporting work from a recent study published in 2021.

With help from his colleague and scite, the doctor was able to find specific evidence that he could use to better inform his own understanding and to help his patients more effectively.

This short story shows how scite and the unique way of looking at citations can help with information retrieval, interpretation and contextualization, and ultimately more efficient use of the doctor’s time. scite is unique in the scale of citation statement data and the workflows arising from this data are new. We’re excited that scite can offer more than traditional citations helping workflows range from students writing essays to doctors treating patients.

To learn more about how to utilize the filters on scite reports, watch an overview here, or read about it here.