BROOKLYN, NY — May 14, 2020 — scite, a platform for the discovery and evaluation of scientific articles, today announced it has been awarded $1.5 million from Phase II of its Fast-Track Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The startup, launched in May 2019, has pioneered the use of Smart Citations in scientific publishing–citations that display the context of citations and describe whether citing articles provide supporting or contradicting evidence–to help its users better understand the veracity of scientific research.

During Phase I of the grant, scite added hundreds of millions of citations to their database and significantly improved the accuracy of its deep learning model. Their work earned them top prizes in scientific publishing, including the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) Award for Innovation in Publishing and the International Society of Managing & Technical Editors (ISMTE) People’s choice award. More recently, scite was featured in Nature, highlighting the platform’s unique ability to systematically identify what research on Coronavirus and COVID-19 has been supported or contradicted.

“We’re humbled by this award and are excited to further develop Smart Citations to make science more reliable,” said Josh Nicholson, co-founder and CEO of scite. He continued, “The utility of scite has become increasingly evident to researchers given the pandemic and the dramatic increase in the rate of publishing. We’re keen to work with publishers to help researchers better evaluate and discover research articles.”

Nicholson notes that the startup has already partnered with Wiley, Rockefeller University Press, Karger, Frontiers, Future Science Group, the BMJ, Future Science Group, and IOP and will seek to work with more publishers to determine how Smart Citations can improve research for Phase II of the grant.

About scite

scite is a Brooklyn-based startup that helps researchers better discover and evaluate scientific articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contradicting evidence. Scite is used by researchers from dozens of countries and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health. For more information, please visit scite, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, and download our Chrome or Firefox plugin. For open positions at scite, please see our jobs page.

NIH Disclaimer

The research proposal described herein was supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R44DA050155. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.