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The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and scite Partner to Launch Smart Citations

Wed Apr 20 2022

Brooklyn, NY —April 20, 2022 — scite, an award-winning tool that helps students and researchers discover and understand research findings more efficiently through Smart Citations, has partnered with the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Through advanced machine learning techniques, scite has developed a system that extracts citation statements—the in-text sentences where references are used—from scientific articles, shows in which section they appear in the citing articles, and classifies them as supporting, contrasting, or mentioning of the claims from the referenced work. This information allows readers to quickly and easily see how an article has been cited and engaged with in subsequent research, providing a more nuanced and rich source of information than a simple citation count and list of cited articles without context.

To date, scite has partnered with over 20 different publishers, analyzing and indexing nearly 1B citation statements extracted from over 30M full-text articles. Smart Citations are live on over 3M articles published by Wiley, The Royal Society, The American Physiological Society, and others. In addition to helping readers with a richer view of the literature, this partnership will help ensure researchers are citing reliable work, an important issue addressed in the July 30, 2021, PNAS editorial by Editor-in-Chief May R. Berenbaum, “On zombies, struldbrugs, and other horrors of the scientific literature.”

Josh Nicholson, cofounder and CEO of scite says, “We’re happy to be working with the National Academy of Sciences to launch Smart Citations on articles published by PNAS. We developed Smart Citations to help provide more contextual information than what is traditionally offered from citations. In today's world, such context is more important than ever.”

“It has been abundantly clear for decades that just counting citations is an incomplete and often misleading way to characterize the contribution of a paper to the scientific literature,” said May R. Berenbaum, Editor-in-Chief of PNAS. “By partnering with scite, PNAS helps the scientific reading public understand not only how many times a paper in our journal is cited but also who is citing it and why it’s being cited. Context isn't always everything, but it’s always important.”

About scite scite is a Brooklyn-based startup that helps researchers better discover and evaluate scientific articles through Smart Citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. Scite is used by researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.

About the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), is an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans the biological, physical, and social sciences. The journal is global in scope and submission is open to all researchers worldwide. Since its establishment in 1914, PNAS has worked to publish only the highest-quality scientific research and to make that research accessible to a broad audience. In addition, PNAS publishes nonresearch content, including Commentaries, Perspectives, Colloquium Papers, podcasts, and profiles of NAS members.