Identifying and Engaging with Key Opinion Leaders using Smart Citations from scite
Within each research discipline, experts, or those that have been in the field for many years, generally have a deep understanding of the literature, knowing which claims in studies have been supported in the literature and which have not. Hence why consulting experts is such a valuable practice. Determining this “insider information” independently is exceedingly difficult, forcing non-experts to rely upon various proxies of quality and impact to better assess and understand research. These proxies, such as the h-index, institutional affiliation, or the impact factor of a journal, only provide superficial information–a far cry from what an expert might tell you. Here we describe a new tool called scite that helps anyone surface valuable “inside information” with Smart Citations, information that can be used to identify and engage the Key Opinion Leaders more effectively.
What are Smart Citations?
Smart Citations are like traditional citations, linking papers to one another. But in addition to a simple linkage, they also display the textual context from the citing article, a citation type indicating if the citation provides supporting or contrasting evidence, and the location of the citation. While a bibliography allows you to see all the papers that are cited in one paper, Smart Citations allow anyone to see all the papers that cite one paper, alongside the full context of each of the citation statements. In short, Smart Citations allow you to see how something has been cited, not just how many times, allowing anyone to quickly get a near expert level overview of research and researchers. To understand the utility of Smart Citations, let’s look at a paper as we might look at it today and then through the lens of scite.
Using one of my own publications as an example, we can immediately see that it was published in eLife, it has been cited 48 times, viewed over 9,000 times, and the research group consists of researchers from Virginia Tech, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the University of Porto. Knowing this information, you might have already made some judgments on the work but you almost certainly cannot tell if this work has been tested by others and if its findings have been supported or not. This information exists, living within the 48 papers and reviews citing my work, but in order to access it, you would need to open 48 different studies, find where they cite my work, and then determine if each one supports my study, presents contrasting evidence, or simply mentions it. This is a massive amount of work and thus something that is never done effectively. Essentially, we treat citations, which contain a wealth of information, superficially where high is good and low is bad or early.
scite unlocks this wealth of information through Smart Citations. Using the scite browser extension, which presents scite metrics anywhere you’re reading an article online, you can easily see if a publication has been supported, mentioned, or contrasted by others. In this case, the extension displays three numbers: 2, 60, and 0 next to icons representing supporting, mentioning, and contrasting citation types. Clicking through the extension brings you to the scite report, which allows you to effortlessly see each of those citations.
The first citation snippet you see is from a paper published three years after my own in the journal MBoC by an independent group. The citation appears in the Results section of the paper and has been classified as supporting, indicating that they provide supporting evidence. Reading the citation snippet allows you to see exactly what this supporting evidence is and why they cite my work. In a few moments, you can see that the findings in this study were supported by others. Such information has always been available but buried in an avalanche of citations; scite simply unlocks this potential.
Checking how other papers cite my article is easy and can be done by simply browsing other citation snippets, searching for keywords, filtering by where they appear in the paper, the year they were published, the article type, and more.
How can scite help me identify and engage with KOLs?
This novel way of looking at research can help anyone better identify and engage with the literature and consequently researchers themselves. For example, say you are starting to perform research on Nonalcoholic Steatohepatitis (NASH) and want to identify who are the most prominent researchers in this field. Using scite you can simply search “Nonalcoholic Steatohepatitis (NASH)”.
NOTE: You can make this dashboard with any list of DOIs, so it is compatible with any search tool. To learn more, read here: https://help.scite.ai/en-us/article/how-do-i-make-and-use-custom-dashboards-17gc5fd/
This search identifies 9,216 results where NASH is mentioned in the title or abstract. To better understand who the leaders in this field are over the last 5 years, we can restrict the search from 2015 onwards, bringing the search to 5,337 results. We can filter directly on the search page, sorting by which article has received the most supporting or contrasting evidence, and we can even set citation ranges such as papers that have received at least two supporting cites and no contrasting cites.
To better understand this field, we can create a custom scite dashboard from any search to see this information in aggregate. We can also save our search to set alerts to be notified when new articles matching my search criteria are published, or when new Smart Citations referencing these articles are indexed.
According to scite, these 5,337 articles have received 79,258 total citations, of which 3,043 are supporting and 364 are contrasting. One article has been retracted in this set, 19 have been corrected, and 14 have errata. The scite index, which represents a ratio of supporting cites to total testing cites (Supporting / (Supporting + Contrasting)) in the specific window, allows you to see how fields are trending in terms of supporting or contrasting evidence.
Scrolling down shows the articles organized by citations. The most highly cited article in terms of total citations and supporting citations is the meta-analysis, “Global epidemiology of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease-Meta-analytic assessment of prevalence, incidence, and outcomes.” Restricting to papers with no contrasting citations, allows you to identify “Adaptation of Hepatic Mitochondrial Function in Humans with Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Is Lost in Steatohepatitis” as the most supported article with no contrasting cites. This information allows researchers to easily understand any field better, to identify the most cited articles, including those that have received supporting or contrasting evidence, and to set up email alerts to be notified as the scientific conversation continues. This is a powerful tool for understanding and engaging with researchers.
As a possibility, one might use such a tool to find KOLs by identifying authors with the most supporting cites and engage them by notifying them how you found them. Remarkably, even experts and authors often don’t know when their work has been supported in the literature as one research proclaimed after learning about scite on Twitter.
We like to think of scite as a superpower for anyone trying to understand, manage, and partake in the ongoing scientific conversation. This article outlined one way you can use it to better understand a new field of research, and even identify and engage leading experts in the field. We’d love for you to give it a try and give us feedback, or share how you use scite to supercharge your research!
