Today, we’re excited to introduce the capability for scite users to ask research questions in plain language and get answers directly from the full text of research articles (Try it out now).

Think of all the questions you’ve had and how difficult it was to find a reliable answer. Maybe you wondered whether Tanning beds increase the risk of cancer, or Does drinking hard water have any negative health effects?

On google, you get ads. Elsewhere, you’re not sure if you can trust the source. Or you have to construct your question in a way that a scientific expert can.

Our new “Ask a Question” search lets you ask frequent questions like this in simple, human terms. And we show you results straight from the full-text of over 32 million research articles that have the answer you’re looking for, or at least a clue to point you in the right direction.

Asking, “Do tanning beds increase the risk of cancer?” surfaces answers like this, which indicate that there is an associated cancer risk, with the confidence that these results are backed by peer-reviewed research.

And asking “Does drinking hard water have any negative health effects?” yields a number of results indicating some of the adverse effects of drinking hard water.

By the way, these results are not summarized or AI-generated, but snippets from full-text articles that real researchers wrote and published.

How is this possible?

At scite, we’ve built the world’s largest database of Citation Statements – the sentences from full-text articles where references are used in-text.

When we started years ago, we leveraged these to disambiguate traditional citation counts through our badge, and helped users read exactly how a particular paper and its findings were cited in newer research through our article report pages.

Then, we built a unique search experience across those Citation Statements, allowing users across domains to find facts straight from the full-text of articles. But even this required some advanced knowledge of querying.

Now, with “Ask a Question”, that wealth of information is even more accessible to anyone who engages with research.

Try it out now, and let us know what you think. For a deep dive into how it works on a technical level, check out our blog post