We recently launched scite for public beta testing and have been overwhelmed with the amount of supporting and encouraging responses we have received from users. Thank you, it made our week! We also greatly appreciate all the contradicting feedback and questions suggesting that we should explain why we created scite, what it is, how it works, and who runs it? Here are our answers:

Why

We see science as one of the most consequential human activities and one of humankind’s greatest achievements that has given us many benefits, from medicines and technology to a greater understanding of some of life’s biggest questions. We would like to contribute to science by helping researchers, funding organizations, and science administrators focus, as a prominent cancer researcher put it, on building “houses of bricks rather than mansions of straw.”

These “mansions” are built in massive numbers because current financial and career incentives for practicing researchers are mis-aligned with what rigorous science and finding the truth demand. The dominant incentive now is to publish, whatever it takes. The goal of scite is to encourage publishing results and conclusions that are reliable. We do it by making evidence contradicting or supporting scientific claims easily accessible to anyone.

How

scite is a platform that allows anyone to quickly find if a scientific article has been supported, contradicted, or mentioned by subsequent studies. To accomplish this, scite automatically extracts citation statements from scientific publications and classifies them as supporting, contradicting, or mentioning using deep learning models and a network of experts. As of today, we have 230 million citation statements from about 5M articles that cite 25M others. We are adding more citation statements daily.

Misclassified scites can be flagged by any user and the suggested classification will be reviewed by two independent experts. If they both agree, the classification is automatically changed and is labelled as Expert Classified

Who

scite was founded and is run by a small group of current and former academics with expertise in biomedical research, psychology, computer science, and even the classics. scite is supported by private and government funding.

Have more questions? Please let us know!