Thursday, February 22, 2024

AI Corner: SCITE, A Subscription Tool for Science & Policy Writing

Header:  SCITE is a subscription tool that supercharges your ability to instantly see and evaluate citations to an index paper.  In a few seconds, you get "the buzz" of what a dozen later papers think of your index paper.

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There are coming to be hundreds of special AI tools, and a whole YouTube genre of reviewing them.  One that I've found useful a number of times is SCITE.   You give it an index paper, and it shows you all the papers that cite it.  But that's not what's new.  

SCITE also shows you the context in which each paper cites your index paper.  And that is truly a new capability.  Instead of finding and downloading a dozen PDFs known to cite your index paper, on one screen in a few seconds you can see the context of their remarks on your index paper.

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Take an example. You figured out that the go-to paper on the fizzle of the CMS Oncology Care Model is JAMA, 2021, Keating.   Here it is highlighed as a key paper in SCITE.


One of the articles that cites KEATING, is BROOKS 2022.  OK, now in Brooks 2022, Keating is reference #13.   And SCITE will show you all 6 places where Brooks refers to Keating 2021, and the context, like a half paragraph.

One more example.  Landom 2023 also Keating multiple times,  But in Landom 2023, the Keating article is "Ref #7".  So here, SCITE pulls up the places where Landom cites to Landom's Ref 7 which is Keating 2021.


There are many more bells and whistles in SCITE but this a key capability.
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Other resources of potential interest are Semantic Scholar, Google Biomed Explorer.  See also the general AI  sources Perplexity.ai and You.com.  The latter 2 are both general AI's, with a free tier, but which are especially adept with citations.  I showed an example of drafting a footnoted article with Perplexity in an earlier blog.

See my mini review of SCISPACE, which is different but complemntary to SCITE.