Hi,
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
Disclaimer: I work at scite.
I want to clarify one point in your comment because I know a lot of people read HN comments before clicking through: we do NOT offer AI summaries!
scite is fundamentally built on the idea that not all citations are equal. We offer disambiguation into citations by extracting the in-text contexts when citations happen between two papers. With that, you can qualitatively see how a paper has been cited by others by seeing the citation contexts from each citing paper.
As someone who used to be in research before at the National Cancer Institute, I certainly agree that scientists who are advanced in their field should know the literature inside out.
But the utility of scite is I think quite a bit more than that:
- If you're an expert scientist, you can configure alerts to know when new citations happen to papers that you care about (e.g. ones you published, or that are important in your field, etc). Except unlike Google Scholar alerts and such, you can now immediately see the citation contexts (as opposed to opening up each paper, and trying to locate the reference(s) and the in-text citations).
- If you're a student or an experienced researcher trying to ramp up in a new field (which is increasingly important given how interdisciplinary science is these days), this is a useful tool in your arsenal to digest and discover new papers.
- That last comment also applies if you are in the industry! e.g. someone in pharma doing drug discovery or evaluation and you're working on different drugs every <X> months.
We do have a preprint we published if you'd like to read more about how scite works: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.15.435418v1
I hope that was clear. I'm happy to answer any other questions. I'll try to come back and check periodically.
- Ashish
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
Disclaimer: I work at scite.
I want to clarify one point in your comment because I know a lot of people read HN comments before clicking through: we do NOT offer AI summaries!
scite is fundamentally built on the idea that not all citations are equal. We offer disambiguation into citations by extracting the in-text contexts when citations happen between two papers. With that, you can qualitatively see how a paper has been cited by others by seeing the citation contexts from each citing paper.
As someone who used to be in research before at the National Cancer Institute, I certainly agree that scientists who are advanced in their field should know the literature inside out.
But the utility of scite is I think quite a bit more than that:
- If you're an expert scientist, you can configure alerts to know when new citations happen to papers that you care about (e.g. ones you published, or that are important in your field, etc). Except unlike Google Scholar alerts and such, you can now immediately see the citation contexts (as opposed to opening up each paper, and trying to locate the reference(s) and the in-text citations).
- If you're a student or an experienced researcher trying to ramp up in a new field (which is increasingly important given how interdisciplinary science is these days), this is a useful tool in your arsenal to digest and discover new papers.
- That last comment also applies if you are in the industry! e.g. someone in pharma doing drug discovery or evaluation and you're working on different drugs every <X> months.
We do have a preprint we published if you'd like to read more about how scite works: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.15.435418v1
I hope that was clear. I'm happy to answer any other questions. I'll try to come back and check periodically.
- Ashish