Scite

AI Research / Smart Citations

Scite is an AI research platform best known for Smart Citations: citation contexts classified as supporting, contrasting, or mentioning a claim, so you can see how later papers treated a finding. It also offers an AI Assistant grounded in scholarly full text, collections, citation alerts, and search across articles plus patents, clinical trials, and grants on higher tiers. Scite is part of Research Solutions.

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Best AI tools for

All use cases · All industries

Alternatives & similar tools

Related picks from editorial notes.

Also mentioned

Consensus (AI search with Consensus Meter and Deep reviews)
Elicit (research automation and extraction workflows)
Semantic Scholar (free academic graph and Influential Citation concepts)
Google Scholar (free discovery
no Smart Citation classification)
ResearchRabbit (literature mapping and author/paper discovery)

Features & details

Full overview from our catalog (read-only reference).

Category (short)

AI Research / Smart Citations

Sponsored note

Target audience

Researchers, students, journalists, and analysts who need citation reliability signals and evidence-linked answers. Not ideal for: users wanting a free forever academic search habit (no durable free tier on the current public pricing page), or teams that only need PDF management without citation classification.

Best for

Pricing notes

Verified August 2026 at scite.ai/pricing. Individual Basic: $20/month (yearly billing advertised with Save $96). Includes unlimited Assistant usage, full-text search, Smart Citation Reports, citation alerts, 250 MCP credits/month, ChatGPT and Claude integrations, collections up to 1,000 papers. Individual Pro: $50/month (yearly Save $120 messaging) with API access, 2,500 MCP credits/month, collections up to 10,000 papers, and patent/clinical trial/grant datasets. Team and Enterprise: sales. 7-day free trial; cancel before trial end to avoid auto-enrollment. Student/academic discounts available via institution recommendation process described on the pricing FAQ.

Pros & cons

Editorial notes to help compare fit before opening the vendor site.

Pros

Smart Citations answer whether a finding is supported better than raw citation counts
Evidence links back to specific passages rather than unsupported chat claims
Clear Basic vs Pro individual pricing with a short trial
Integrates into ChatGPT/Claude/MCP workflows researchers already use

Cons

No lasting free tier on the current public pricing page
$20 to $50/month is meaningful for students paying out of pocket
MCP credit caps can constrain heavy assistant use on Basic
Full value often depends on institutional access for paywalled full text

Review notes

Context from the listing review and editorial research.

Acquired by Research Solutions (announced 2023). Distinct from general cite browser extensions. Smart Citations are the durable differentiator; the AI Assistant is the newer growth surface. Confirm annual checkout totals, because the page markets monthly prices with yearly savings.

Extended features

In-depth description and capability notes.

Smart Citations showing supporting vs contrasting vs mentioning citation context AI Assistant answers grounded in scholarly sources with links back to passages Full-text literature search over a large licensed plus open corpus Collections, citation alerts, and Smart Citation reports MCP credits plus ChatGPT/Claude integrations for assistant workflows Higher tiers add larger collections, more MCP credits, patents/clinical trials/grants, and API access

Use cases

Researchers evaluating whether a cited claim is actually supported use Scite before trusting a paper's citation count alone: open the citation report, see who supported or challenged the finding, then ask the assistant for evidence-linked synthesis.