Scite

Scite uses a freemium model with a free tier plus paid plans. Paid pricing starts at around $20/month for the Basic plan aimed at individual researchers, with Pro at $50/month and Team at $100/month for two users. Enterprise pricing for universities and organizations is quote-based; verify current numbers on Scite's pricing page since plans and credit allowances change.

Smart Citations classify each citation to a paper as supporting, contrasting, or mentioning the claim, rather than just counting how many times it was cited. Scite shows the surrounding sentence so you can see the context, and you can apply the same analysis to a journal, author, institution, or funder. This helps you judge whether a finding has been reinforced or challenged by later research.

Scite connects to Zotero, offers a browser extension, and runs inside Claude, ChatGPT, and other MCP-compatible assistants via connectors. MCP usage is metered in monthly credits that vary by plan. A developer API is available for teams building their own tools, though it is offered at the Enterprise level.

Scite searches more than 280 million full-text scholarly sources, including articles, preprints, books, patents, and datasets, drawing on 1.6B+ citations. Its depth comes from direct licensing agreements with Wiley, SAGE, and 40+ other publishers plus the open access corpus, so it reads inside papers rather than stopping at abstracts. Higher tiers add patents, clinical trials, grants, and regulatory/safety datasets.

Enterprise plans include SAML/SSO, enhanced security and data confidentiality, flexible access by domain, IP, or email, and a dedicated customer success manager. These features are designed for universities and organizations that need managed, secure deployment across many users. Individuals and small teams on lower tiers get standard account-level access without these institutional controls.

Scite's assistant is designed to ground every answer in real papers and link each claim back to the specific sentence it came from, so answers are verifiable rather than generated from nothing. This verification-first approach is meant to reduce hallucinated or unsourced content. You should still click through to check the source to confirm the interpretation.

Scite does not offer a free plan. It operates on a freemium model with a 7-day free trial, after which users must subscribe to a paid plan starting at $20/month for the Basic tier. Student discounts of 30-50% are available on paid plans.

Scite offers a Zotero plugin, browser extensions, and MCP (Model Context Protocol) access. The platform also provides embedded badges and API access, though specific integration details for other research tools were not extensively documented in available research.

Scite's Smart Citations feature is uniquely useful for checking how papers cite each other and whether findings are supported or contradicted. Alternatives like Semantic Scholar offer free citation tracking but without Scite's citation context classification. Users often recommend using Scite alongside tools like Elicit (for finding papers) and Consensus (for understanding disagreements) rather than as a replacement.