Cited is not the same as supported
A paper with five hundred citations might be famous for being wrong. Scite's premise is that the sentence around a citation tells you more than the count ever will.
Supporting citations
Later papers whose citation statements agree with or confirm the original finding. A healthy count here, especially from independent groups, is real evidence that a result has held up.
Contrasting citations
Later work that disputes the finding or failed to replicate it. Even a handful of these is a signal to slow down, read the statements, and figure out what exactly is being contested.
Mentioning citations
The bulk of most citation records: papers that cite without judging. On its own it measures attention, and the ratio of mentions to supports and contrasts is often the most honest summary of a paper's standing.
What you will do in the lesson
You answer and try things, step by step.
- Pull up a Smart Citation report. You look at the report for a well-known paper and read the supporting, contrasting, and mentioning tallies. First impressions form fast, and you check yours.
- Read the citation statements. Behind each tally are the actual sentences from citing papers. You read a few and see how much more they tell you than a bare number.
- Find the contrasting ones. You open the contrasting citations and work out whether the dispute is about the method, the conclusion, or the interpretation. Those are very different kinds of trouble.
- Judge a shaky claim. Given two papers with similar citation counts but different Smart Citation profiles, you decide which one you would build on. This is the core skill Scite exists for.
- Audit a reference list. You run the reference-check idea over a short bibliography and flag anything resting on disputed or retracted work. Five minutes here can save a review cycle later.
Before you start
How does Scite know whether a citation supports or contrasts?
A machine-learning classifier reads citation statements extracted from full-text articles through agreements with publishers. It gets some wrong, which is exactly why Scite shows you the underlying sentence so you can judge for yourself.
Does Scite cover my field?
Its index holds over a billion citation statements across disciplines, with the deepest coverage where full-text agreements are strongest, notably biomedical and natural sciences. Sparse Smart Citations for a paper can mean limited coverage rather than limited impact.
Do I need to install anything for this lesson?
No. The lesson runs in the embedded frame on this page, no account needed. Scite itself offers a free way to try it if you want to look up your own papers afterwards.
I already check citation counts on Google Scholar. Is this better?
Counts measure attention, and attention is not agreement. Scholar tells you a paper is talked about; Scite tells you whether the conversation supports it, disputes it, or just name-drops it. For deciding what to trust, that second layer changes the answer surprisingly often.
