The National Science Foundation Awards scite Competitive R&D Grant to Build Tool to Identify and Promote Reliable Research

Small Business Innovation Research Program Provides Seed Funding for R&D

Brooklyn, NY, July 22nd, 2019– scite, Inc. has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant for $224,559 to conduct research and development (R&D) work on developing a deep learning platform that can evaluate the reliability of scientific claims by citation analysis.

Reports indicate that 50–90% of scientific reports cannot be reproduced, costing the public, funders, and industry billions of dollars and affecting millions of lives. scite uses state of the art technology in deep learning and natural language processing to develop a platform that helps its users determine if a scientific report has been independently confirmed.

“NSF is proud to support the technology of the future by thinking beyond incremental developments and funding the most creative, impactful ideas across all markets and areas of science and engineering,” said Andrea Belz, Division Director of the Division of Industrial Innovation and Partnerships at NSF. “With the support of our research funds, any deep technology startup or small business can guide basic science into meaningful solutions that address tremendous needs.”

“We’re excited to have the support of the NSF to continue research and development on scite,” said Josh Nicholson, co-founder and CEO of scite. He continued, “there is an enormous amount of information contained within scientific publications that today is totally underutilized. By applying advanced machine learning techniques, we’re able to extract citation statements and classify them as supporting, contradicting, or mentioning thereby allowing anyone to see if a scientific report has been supported or contradicted with just a few clicks. The funding from the NSF will be critical in helping us further develop the technical methods needed to accomplish this.”

Once a small business is awarded a Phase I SBIR grant (up to $225,000), it becomes eligible to apply for a Phase II grant (up to $750,000).

About the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Programs

America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF awards $200 million annually to startups and small businesses, transforming scientific discovery into products and services with commercial and societal impact. Startups working across almost all areas of science and technology can receive up to $1.5 million in non-dilutive funds to support research and development (R&D), helping de-risk technology for commercial success. America’s Seed Fund is congressionally mandated through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The NSF is an independent federal agency with a budget of about $8.1 billion that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering.

To learn more about America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF, visit:

https://seedfund.nsf.gov/

About scite

scite is a Brooklyn-based startup that allows anyone to see if a scientific report has been supported or contradicted. Utilizing deep learning and a network of experts, scite classifies hundreds of millions of citation statements from millions of scientific articles as supporting, contradicting, or mentioning.

https://scite.ai/