Smart Citations

A citation count says a paper was cited 400 times. A Smart Citation tally says how many of those citations support the finding, contradict it, or mention it. These endpoints return that breakdown for any DOI, the citing papers behind it, and the section where each statement appears. See Citations & Tallies for the difference between a tally count and a citing-publications count. Need an API key? On Pro, create one in the API Console. Creating a key doesn’t grant every optional scope; see Authentication for feature access. For higher limits or managed credentials, contact sales.

Get a tally for one DOI

curl 'https://api.scite.ai/tallies/10.1038/nature12373' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_API_KEY>'

Get tallies for many DOIs

curl -X POST 'https://api.scite.ai/tallies' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer <YOUR_API_KEY>' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"dois": ["10.1038/nature12373", "10.1126/science.1157784"]}'

Up to 500 DOIs per request. A GET variant of this endpoint also exists for compatibility, but POST is recommended for larger DOI lists.

Tallies by section

Citations occurring in the Introduction carry different weight than citations in the Discussion. GET /tallies/cited-by-sections/{doi} (and the bulk POST /tallies/cited-by-sections) breaks the tally down by the section of the citing paper where the statement appears.

Browsing the citation graph

Rather than a tally, you can retrieve the actual citing/cited publications:

Endpoint	Returns
`GET /api_partner/citations/citing/{doi}`	Sources that cite this DOI as a target
`GET /api_partner/citations/cited_by/{doi}`	Targets cited by this DOI as a source
`GET /api_partner/references/references_to/{doi}`	Distinct references to this publication
`GET /api_partner/references/references_from/{doi}`	Distinct references from this publication

Citation Graph responses contain metadata and a citations array:

{
  "metadata": {},
  "citations": [
    {
      "source": "10.1000/source-doi",
      "target": "10.1000/target-doi",
      "type": "supporting",
      "section": "discussion"
    }
  ]
}

A highly cited DOI can return thousands of citation records. Use limit with offset to page through graphs that exceed 3,000 records, and avoid fetching the full graph when a tally is sufficient.

Journal-level data

GET /journal/{issn}/tallies: Smart Citation tallies aggregated for an entire journal
GET /journal/{issn}/yearly-si: the Scite Journal Index (SJI) broken down by year
GET /issn-sji / POST /issn-sji-bulk: look up the Scite Journal Index for one or many ISSNs

Journal-level tallies use different field names than DOI-level tallies: totalCites, totalSupportingCites, totalContrastingCites, totalMentioningCites, and totalUnclassifiedCites, rather than total, supporting, contradicting, mentioning, and unclassified. Don’t assume the two shapes match.

Search guide: filter by tally signals like has_tally or supporting_from
Citations & Tallies: the underlying data model
Errors and rate limits: authentication, scope, and retry guidance

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Reference

Get a tally for one DOI

Get tallies for many DOIs

Tallies by section

Browsing the citation graph

Journal-level data

​Get a tally for one DOI

​Get tallies for many DOIs

​Tallies by section

​Browsing the citation graph

​Journal-level data

​Related

Get a tally for one DOI

Get tallies for many DOIs

Tallies by section

Browsing the citation graph

Journal-level data

Related