Scite

Scite operates a search, discovery and evaluation platform for scientific literature built around "Smart Citations": rather than reporting only citation counts, the platform extracts the sentence in which a reference appears, shows the surrounding context and the citing section, and classifies the statement as supporting, contrasting or mentioning the cited claim. The classification is produced with deep learning and natural language processing applied to full-text articles obtained through indexing agreements with publishers such as Wiley, SAGE and more than 30 others.

Around this citation index the company offers a set of research workflow features: full-text and citation-statement search across titles, abstracts and citation statements; customizable dashboards for tracking collections of literature; a reference check tool that verifies the references in a manuscript; journal, author and institution metrics; browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari; embeddable citation and section badges for websites; an API; and synchronization with Zotero and Mendeley libraries. Scite Assistant is an AI chatbot that uses Smart Citations to ground and fact-check answers from large language models, positioned as an evidence-based assistant for research questions asked in plain language.

Scite was founded in 2018 in Brooklyn, New York, and was acquired by Research Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ: RSSS) in late 2023, after which it has been offered as part of the Research Solutions product family alongside Article Galaxy Scholar.

Founding story

Scite was founded in 2018 in Brooklyn, New York, by Josh Nicholson and Yuri Lazebnik. The underlying concept dates to 2014, when Nicholson and Lazebnik proposed classifying citations by context — supporting, contrasting or mentioning — rather than by count alone, to address limitations of traditional metrics such as journal impact factors; the idea was first published by Lazebnik on The Winnower, an open-access platform co-founded by Nicholson. Nicholson, who serves as CEO, holds a PhD from Virginia Tech (2015) in biomedical research and has worked in scholarly publishing and technology startups; Lazebnik, a cell biologist, was co-founder and an early advisor. The early team included psychology professor Sean Rife, who helped with prototyping, medical student Peter Grabitz, CTO Milo Mordaunt, and Patrice Lopez, creator of the GROBID text-mining tool. An initial prototype analyzing citation snippets was built with private funding and moved to a production-ready platform by early 2019.

Business model

Scite sells cloud-based subscription access to its platform, with a business-to-consumer tier for individual researchers and business-to-business subscriptions for corporate entities, academic institutions and government agencies. Institutional customers such as university libraries purchase site-wide access for their users. Additional distribution channels include free embeddable citation badges, browser extensions, and paid API access for integrating Scite data into third-party systems.

Recurring software subscription revenue, sold on monthly and annual terms to both individual researchers (B2C) and organizations (B2B), plus API access for data integration.

Traction

At the time of the November 2023 acquisition announcement, Scite had approximately 21,000 active B2C subscribers plus B2B customers among corporations, academic institutions and government agencies, and annualized B2C and B2B subscription value of $3.6 million as of October 31, 2023; the company was profitable. The platform's marketing states more than one billion citation statements analyzed, more than 200 million articles, books, preprints and datasets indexed, and use by more than one million researchers. Institutional adoption includes university libraries such as Coastal Carolina University and Clemson University.

Latest developments

Following its acquisition by Research Solutions, Scite has been extended with integrations to third-party AI tools: Research Solutions launched Scite MCP in February 2026, connecting ChatGPT, Claude and other AI tools to scientific literature, and announced the Scite Claude Connector in April 2026. Product messaging emphasizes AI synthesis grounded in more than one billion verified citation statements with transparent source tracking.