From the [Medium post](https://medium.com/scite/scite-launches-smart-citations-on-121-wiley-journals-298f4a802ac7) announcing that [scite](https://help.scite.ai) has struck a deal with [Wiley](https://www.wiley.com/en-us) to embed its contextual citation snippets (dubbed, inevitably, Smart Citations) into over a hundred Wiley journals:
> Smart Citations display the context of each citation to a publication, allowing readers to see not only how many times a publication has been cited but also how it was cited. Additionally, scite has deployed a state-of-the-art deep learning model to classify the citation statement as providing supporting or disputing evidence for the cited claim.
I've been following [scite](https://help.scite.ai) since its 2019 launch: It's a small, for-profit Brooklyn-based startup that launched with a [$350k investment](https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/scite-convertible-note--e9e0d145) from NY-based [ff Venture Capital](https://www.ffvc.com). The firm, curiously, has won most of its subsequent funding from federal grants, including a [$1.5 million award](https://medium.com/scite/scite-awarded-1-5-million-fast-track-sbir-grant-from-the-national-institutes-of-health-d1ac6e4ecfde) in May 2020 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA).
The company, in effect, is trying to monetize Henry Small's 30-year-old notion of *citation context analysis* (elaborated in a 1982 out-of-print book chapter).[^1] Scite extracts the text around a citation and then—using a [machine-learning model](https://help.scite.ai/en-us/article/how-are-citations-classified-1a9j78t/)—makes a guess on valence: Is the cite "supporting," "disputing," or a mere "mention"?
Interesting. Too bad it's a for-profit, and [landing deals](https://medium.com/scite/cabells-and-scite-partner-to-bring-smart-citations-to-journalytics-2492b8edcfd6) that, possibly, will rationalize (in both senses) strategic submission behavior and prop up the journal prestige economy.
[^1]: Small, H. G. (1982). Citation context analysis. In B. Dervin & M. J. Voigt (Eds.), *Progress in communication sciences*
(pp. 287–310). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.