Blog / Tutorial

How can I use scite advanced search?

Thu Jul 29 2021

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 then 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.

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.

Basic Search

In addition to basic field searching. You can order your results by scite data, filter your searches, and use boolean search in our main search bar.

Ordering Results

We provide many ordering options such as by date, by supporting citations, by contrasting citations, by citation volume and more.

Using scite filters

There are several filters that a user can use. These come in two forms: citation range filters and metadata filters.

citation range Filters

Our citation range filters allow you to select for the type of support and contrast you are looking for. Common use cases for these is setting it to at least one supporting or at least one contrasting citations. Another common use case is to set supporting citations to 0 and contrasting citations to 1 or greater so you can see publications without any supporting citations and at least one contrasting citation.

Metadata Filters

We have comprehensive metadata on editorial notices (whether a publication has corrections or has been retracted), types of paper (is it a preprint), and more. You can use these filters to select for only results in these categories.

In our main search box we support boolean search syntax. We provide full support the elasticsearch query string syntax which you can read about here .

This means that we support bracketed searches with AND (using +), OR (using |), NOT (using -) operators, wildcard and other string operators. We also support the common surrounding double quotes as a way perform an exact search.

Example:

("mRNA" | "DNA") + ("vaccin*" | "therap*")

We support:

  • + as the AND operation
  • | as the OR operation
  • - negates a search
  • " wraps keywords for an exat match
  • ( and ) signify precedence

Saving Searches and Search Results

There are several ways to save your searches and search results. From the search page you can:

  • Export search results
  • Save a search for later
  • Set an alert on a search
  • Create a dashboard from search results
  • Add individual search results to a dashboard

Troubleshooting

Default AND

Our main search box defaults to using an AND operator across all the terms in the search box. This means that a search for mRNA vaccine children adolescents gets interpreted as mRNA vaccine children adolescents. If you want to make a term optional please use the OR operator: mRNA vaccine children OR adolescents

Clearing Fields

If you are having trouble with your search not turning up results or turning up too many results, you might have a filter set that you do not know about. To start completely from scrash you can click clear fields to get to a fresh search state.

clear fields

Another hint is to look at your URL. It contains your search state and it might have a filter in it that you are unaware of. You can clear it in the url as well. ie. this search has two filters in them https://scite.ai/search?correctionFilter=true&hasCites=true.

Coverage

If you are not finding publications of interest that you know are in other databases, it could be that we have yet to index those publications. Feel free to let us know what is missing and we will try to prioritize it. We ingest millions of documents every week and will work to prioritize sources that our users care about.

Let us know

You can always contact us at customersupport@researchsolutions.com if you need help or click the chat bubble on our home page.