Master scite AI with our step-by-step tutorial, detailed feature walkthrough, and expert tips.
Explore the key features that make scite AI powerful for research agents workflows.
Unlike general-purpose LLMs, scite AI grounds every answer in peer-reviewed literature from its database of 280M+ articles and 1.6B+ classified citations. Every claim in a response includes a direct link to the original paper and the exact passage where the citation appears, so you can verify evidence rather than trust a generated summary. It also classifies citations as supporting, contrasting, or mentioning — something no general chatbot does. This makes it suitable for systematic reviews, grant writing, and clinical decision support where hallucinated references would be unacceptable.
Yes. Scite has direct content agreements with Wiley, SAGE, and 30+ additional publishers, giving it full-text search rights across both open-access and paywalled literature. This is a significant advantage over tools that only index abstracts or open-access repositories. Coverage also spans preprints, books, patents, and datasets, bringing the total corpus to 280M+ documents. Whether you can download the full PDF of a paywalled article still depends on your institutional subscription, but Scite's AI can read and cite the content within its responses.
Smart Citations are scite's proprietary system for analyzing how one paper cites another. A deep learning model reads the surrounding citation context and classifies it as supporting, contrasting, or mentioning, along with the section of the paper it appeared in (Introduction, Results, etc.). The database now contains over 1.6 billion classified citation statements. Each classification comes with a confidence score shown in the interface, and users can click through to see the exact excerpt for verification.
Scite operates on a freemium model. A free trial lets new users explore the Assistant and basic Smart Citation lookups, while individual subscriptions start around $20/month (with discounted annual billing) and unlock the AI Assistant, reference checks, and dashboards. Team and institutional plans are priced on request and often bundled through university library licenses — many researchers get access for free through their affiliation. Students and academics often qualify for reduced pricing.
Yes. Scite offers browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox, Edge) that overlay Smart Citation badges on PubMed, Google Scholar, and publisher sites, plus plugins for Zotero and EndNote for reference management. It also integrates with Microsoft Word for in-document citation checking. In 2025, Scite launched an MCP (Model Context Protocol) endpoint so you can plug its literature grounding directly into Claude, ChatGPT, or custom AI agents — letting you add evidence-backed answers to any agentic workflow.
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Tutorial updated March 2026