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Scite’s data model differs from a plain citation count in a few ways that matter once you start building against the API.

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Target and source

  • Target: the publication being cited.
  • Source: the publication making the citation.
Endpoints are named from this perspective: citing/{doi} returns sources that cite the target {doi}; cited_by/{doi} returns targets cited by the source {doi}.

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Smart Citations

A Smart Citation is a citation statement classified by how it uses the target publication:

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Tallies vs. citing publications

This is the distinction that trips people up most:
  • Tally counts (total, supporting, contradicting, mentioning, unclassified) count individual citation statements that Scite has extracted and classified as Smart Citations.
  • citingPublications counts distinct publications that cite the target, drawn from the broader citation graph rather than only publications with a classified Smart Citation.
These come from different underlying counts, so neither bounds the other. citingPublications can exceed total (not every citing publication has a classified statement) or fall below it (one publication can make several classified statements toward the same target). Treat them as two different measurements, not a count and a subset.

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References vs. citations

In everyday language “citation” and “reference” are interchangeable. In the Scite API, references specifically means the distinct source/target DOI pairs. See the References endpoints (References in the API Reference tab) if you need the raw pairs rather than tally counts.