Brooklyn, NY — November 23, 2022 — scite, an award-winning tool that helps students and researchers discover and understand research findings more efficiently through Smart Citations, has partnered with SPIE, the international society for photonics and optics, to enhance the citation experience on the SPIE Digital Library.

Pioneered by scite, Smart Citations go beyond traditional citations by showing citation statements—the in-text sentences where references are used— the section they appear within the citing articles, and a classification indicating whether the paper provides supporting or contrasting evidence to the cited claim from the referenced work.

The SPIE Digital Library is the world's largest collection of optics and photonics applied research. With more than 550,000 publications spanning biomedicine, communications, sensors, defense and security, manufacturing, electronics, energy, and imaging, the SPIE Digital Library is the most extensive research database available on optics and photonics research and includes the Society’s 14 journals, conference proceedings, presentation videos, posters, and eBooks.

Smart Citations have been developed using sophisticated machine learning models that extract and analyze citation statements from full-text articles at scale. This information helps researchers quickly and easily see how and why 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 two dozen major publishers, analyzing and indexing over 1.1B citation statements extracted from more than 30M full-text articles. Smart Citations will be added to SPIE articles, adding to the already 3M articles that display Smart Citations from other publishers like Wiley, The Royal Society, ACS, and The National Academy of Sciences.

Josh Nicholson, co-founder and CEO of scite, says, “We’re proud to be working with SPIE on the development and deployment of Smart Citations. Together, we can make research more discoverable, understandable, and ultimately reliable. SPIE is a major publisher and a leader in the field, and we’re very excited to work with them and develop the future of citations together.”

“We are excited to partner with Scite and enhance our citation data with their smart citation metrics and citation snippets," said SPIE Director of Publications and Platform Patrick Franzen. "Integrating Scite’s tool into the SPIE Digital Library will allow us to better communicate the impact of our publications and provide better citation context for individual publications. We believe it will enrich the research experience.”

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.

SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, brings engineers, scientists, students, and business professionals together to advance light-based science and technology. The Society, founded in 1955, connects and engages with our global constituency through industry-leading conferences and exhibitions; publications of conference proceedings, books, and journals in the SPIE Digital Library; and career-building opportunities.