Introducing the scite Plug-in for Zotero

Fri Nov 16 2018

scite is an award-winning platform for discovering and evaluating scientific articles via Smart Citations. Smart Citations allow users to see how a scientific paper has been cited by providing the context of the citation and a classification describing whether it provides supporting or disputing evidence for the cited claim.

Last month, we announced the launch of our do-it-yourself (DIY) dashboards, which allow you to create a custom dashboard based on any list of articles you wish. Want to track research on coronavirus? Or see how articles from top journals — say, the Journal of Cell Science, or the The Quarterly Journal of Economics — are cited by subsequent studies? These DIY dashboards were a first-step in helping researchers to evaluate and track how articles they are interested in are supported or disputed by others.

Today, we are happy to announce the launch of the scite plug-in for Zotero, which makes it easier than ever to keep track of how articles in your reference library are cited. With the scite plug-in, you can see at a glance how articles in your library have been supported, disputed, or mentioned by other articles.

Instantly see how articles in your Zotero library have been supported, disputed, or cited by others

Want to see the details of how a specific article has been cited? By right-clicking the article, you can select View scite report, which will launch the full scite report in a new browser tab.

Seeing how any article in your library was cited by others is only two clicks away

For example, if we choose to view the scite report for “Is the United States Still a Land of Opportunity? Recent Trends in Intergenerational Mobility” by Chetty et al. (2014), we are presented with a list of citation statements from other researchers who have cited this article, which can be filtered by classification (supporting, disputing, or mentioning), by keyword, by location in the article (intro, methods, results, etc), or by the type of article (journal article, book, etc).

If, for example, we only are concerned with citation statements that include the word status, we can filter these results:

An example of a supporting citation statement

An example of a disputing citation statement

Note that both of the above examples of citation statements come from the same article, Richey et al. (2016) — without scite, researchers would only see that Richey at al. (2016) has cited Chetty et al. (2014), without seeing the necessary context of each citation.

scite’s goal is to help make science more reliable by allowing students, researchers, publishers, and funding institutions to quickly see not only the number of citations of an article, but the context of those citations, and to discover and explore these citations in an interactive way. And now with the scite plug-in for Zotero, the power to help make science more reliable is right at your fingertips.

See what others are saying about the plug-in:

See a demonstration:

Get the plug-in here