“Hmm, I wonder what others say about this publication? Can I trust it? I hope its findings are reproducible...” - Every researcher, ever

This article will cover:

• What the scite report page is
• How to use it effectively to evaluate a research publication

It also assumes that you:

• Understand what Smart Citations are and how they are classified (See: How does scite work?)

The scite Report Page

The scite report for a given publication offers both a quantitative and qualitative look at how it has been cited by others in the broader literature. It is a feature we offer built on top of our database of Smart Citations.

In other words, for a given publication, you can see:

• The number of times it was cited by others.
• How it was cited, by quickly reading the text from the citing papers for each citation that occurred.
• A classification from our system identifying each citation as being supporting, contrasting, or mentioning of its claims.

This allows you to quickly determine what was said about a publication without needing to retrieve each citing publication, let alone having to read each one to find the relevant citations.

By taking advantage of filtering, sorting, and searching citation snippets, you can quickly traverse the citations a publication has received and find the ones most relevant to you.

That all sounds interesting, but why should I use scite reports for my own research?

Finding reliable research is crucial to producing more reliable research in the future. Doing this properly without scite is an extremely time consuming task, and it might look something like this:

• Find a paper you’re interested in
• Search for other papers which reference it
• For each of those citing papers, try and find the corresponding full-text
• Read each full-text to see where the citation happens, and if it is generally supportive or contrasting of the paper of interest
• Synthesize all of the above information and determine if the paper of interest is reliable or not

While certainly possible, we want to free your time to focus on bigger and better aspects of your research.

With scite, all you have to do is load our report for that paper. You can then, in a matter of minutes, evaluate the citations it received and use that to determine whether or not the paper is reliable.

And of course, from a given scite report, you can easily load the scite report for each citing article and see how each of them have in turn been cited.

I’m overwhelmed by so many citation statements at once. How can I find the ones that are relevant to me?

The citation statements a given publication receives can be filtered and ordered in a number of ways. Let’s look at each separately.

Classification

It is possible to filter the citations based on the classification we specify. So for example, through the filters on the left, you can show any combination of supporting, mentioning, or contrasting cites.

Year of publication

If you are interested in only looking at citations received from papers published in a specific year (or a specific range), you can use the year slider to narrow down to your desired window.

Section of the citing publication where the statement occurs

If you want to see where a given publication was cited in methods sections of other publications, you can use the Paper Sections filter on the left to show only citations from that section.

Publication type

This filter is useful for controlling the types of sources that appear in the list of citation statements. So if you want to exclude citations from preprints, you can untick the Preprint filter to remove them.

Text search

Besides filtering the statements based on high-level attributes, it is also possible to directly search the text within the citation statement, or filter based on the title of a citing publication, or the authors.

Sorting by citing publication attributes

Besides filtering the statements and searching them, you can also order the results based on attributes of the citing publication itself. This is particularly useful if you want to see, for example, supporting citations a publication received ordered by the most supported citing publication.

Okay… but I just don’t know if the classifications are relevant for me. Should I still use scite?

Yes, absolutely.

While our classifications are an attempt at quickly determining whether citations provide supporting or contrasting evidence for cited claims, we recognize that, based on your field, the way we classify citations may not be as meaningful (if you are in a methodology based field, for example).

There is still tremendous time-saving value in the citation statements themselves. You can simply focus on the text from each citation statement to see what other papers say and still quickly judge for yourself whether or not the findings from a given publication are well supported.