Reply to Bakker et al.

Bakker, Theis-Mahon, and Brown1 recently presented an analysis of citations in scite.ai, a citation analysis platform. They concluded that the Scite algorithm inaccurately classified citations, particularly those they regarded as supporting previous work. While we strongly believe that independent assessments of Scite’s classifications are valuable, we argue that Bakker et al.’s assessment is incorrect, and that their conclusions are due to their definition of what constitutes supporting or contrasting citations. Additionally, Bakker, et al. restricted their analyses to citations of retracted works in systematic literature reviews, which artificially limits the types of statements that could be considered supporting or contrasting a specific claim. In our reply, we document the rationale for Scite’s classification scheme. We also provide examples of how Scite classifies different types of citations, as well as how these classifications differ from those presented in Bakker et al.