The Landmark Series, Dormant For 30 Years, Returns Through Research Solutions’ Scite, Where The Human Story Behind Scientific Impact Meets The Data To Prove It
Research Solutions (NASDAQ: RSSS) today announced that Scite, its AI-powered research platform, has relaunched Citation Classics, the beloved series originally created by Eugene Garfield at the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in 1977. The series is now live at citationclassics.com.
Over its original 15-year run, Citation Classics invited the authors of highly cited papers to write short commentaries on their own work. More than 4,000 scientists contributed essays recounting the failed experiments, lucky breaks, and collaborators behind their most influential publications. When the series ended, it left a gap that citation data alone could never fill.
Scite is reopening that chapter and expanding on it.
A Richer Look At How Science Evolves
Traditional citation counts treat every citation the same, whether a paper is being praised, challenged, or name-checked in an introduction. Scite’s Smart Citations classify each citation as supporting, contrasting, or mentioning evidence, drawn from an analysis of over 1.6 billion citation statements. That granularity transforms a paper’s citation record from a flat count into a map of scientific discourse.
The revived Citation Classics series puts that capability to work. Each essay pairs an author’s personal narrative with a Smart Citation analysis of their paper, giving readers both the backstory and a data-informed view of how the scientific community has engaged with the work over time. The series will surface not only highly cited papers, but papers that have generated genuine scientific debate, work that has been supported, contested, and reinterpreted in meaningful ways.
“I first spoke with Eugene Garfield on the phone in 2013, during my PhD, when I was trying to revive Citation Classics through my first company, The Winnower,” said Josh Nicholson, Chief Strategy Officer at Research Solutions and co-founder of Scite. “He was generous with his time and genuinely excited that someone wanted to carry the series forward. That conversation stuck with me. Citation Classics worked because it gave scientists a place to tell the human story behind their most important work: the dead ends, the surprises, the collaborators who made it possible. What we can add now, more than a decade later, is the data to match those stories. Scite’s Smart Citations let us show not only that a paper was cited thousands of times, but how the scientific community engaged with it: where it was supported, where it was challenged, and where it shifted a field. We’re also planning to roll out new categories that take advantage of what Smart Citations uniquely reveal, including papers with notable self-corrections, where authors have published contrasting citations to their own earlier work. That kind of intellectual honesty is usually invisible in traditional metrics, and we think it deserves to be celebrated.”
First Essay Now Live
The first essay is available now at citationclassics.com. New essays will be published on a rolling basis, each one examining a landmark paper through the perspective of its author and the lens of how it was cited.
Researchers whose work has had a significant citation life, or those who know of a paper with an interesting story, are encouraged to reach out via the site.
About Scite Scite is an AI-powered research platform that helps researchers discover and evaluate scientific literature using Smart Citations – a technology that analyzes the full text of citing articles to show whether findings have been supported, mentioned, or contrasted by subsequent research. Scite is used by millions of researchers and is available as a web platform, browser extension, and Zotero plugin. For more information, visit https://www.scite.ai. Scite is a product of Research Solutions (NASDAQ: RSSS).
About Research Solutions Research Solutions (NASDAQ: RSSS) is a vertical SaaS and AI company that simplifies research workflow for academic institutions, life science companies, and research organizations worldwide. As one of the only publisher-independent marketplaces for scientific, technical, and medical (STM) content, the company uniquely combines AI-powered tools – including an intelligent research assistant and full-text search capabilities – with seamless access to both open access and paywalled research. The platform enables organizations to discover, access, manage, and analyze scientific literature more efficiently, accelerating the pace of scientific discovery. For more information about Research Solutions, visit: www.researchsolutions.com | LinkedIn | Facebook | X
Contact Lydia Lindenberg, Director of Content Marketing, llindenberg@researchsolutions.com.
Member News Release submitted by Research Solutions on 03/11/2026.
