Organizer
Josh Nicholson, co-founder and CEO of scite
Website or social media links
Project duration
Ongoing project
Project duration
Indefinitely
Project aims
Overview of the challenge to overcome
Reviewing and curating preprints openly at scale is challenging.
The ideal outcome or output of the project
Implementation of the scite Smart Citation badge (https://scite.ai/badge) on all preprints allowing readers to see which preprints have been cited, how they have been cited, and which have been supported or disputed.
Description of the intervention
scite is a startup that helps researchers better discover and understand scientific articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the citing article provides supporting or contradicting evidence. The aim of this intervention is to expose Smart Citations on preprints via the scite Smart Citation badge, leveraging preprints themselves (and published articles) as a source for commentary and review. Additionally, Smart Citations could also serve as a signal for potential editors to invite authors for formal journal submission or for overlay journals to use in curation. scite badges would link directly to the corresponding preprint scite report. For example,

https://scite.ai/reports/presence-of-sars-cov-2-reactive-t-68LGglnk.
Plan for monitoring project outcome
The project outcome will be measured by the number of preprints displaying badges, and will be further assessed using preprint citation dashboards that show the most cited preprints, and indicate which have been most frequently supported or disputed by subsequent research (like journal dashboards: https://scite.ai/journals), and referral traffic from scite badges (measuring those opening the reports).
What’s needed for success
Additional technology development
The project is ready to be deployed today. However, improvements such as preprint-article disambiguation and identifying preprints without DOIs would improve the intervention.
Feedback, beta testing, collaboration, endorsement
scite has won multiple publishing awards and is working with a dozen publishers to index and display smart citations on the version of record.
Funding
1 FTE developer at 100k/year to make supplemental improvements but could also be mostly accomplished without funding and supplemental improvements.
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