Dimensions AI vs Semantic Scholar vs Elicit vs Scite
A side-by-side look at scores, pricing and features — with RECATOOLS' ASEAN-aware verdict for each.
Dimensions AI
Linked research database: papers, grants, patents — free search tier
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Semantic Scholar
Free AI-powered academic search across 236M+ papers, all fields.
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Elicit
AI research assistant for academic literature reviews
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Scite
Citation index that flags support vs. contradiction, not just count
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| RECATOOLS Score | 7.4 / 10 | 8 / 10 | 7.6 / 10 | 6.8 / 10 |
| Capability | ||||
| Value for money | ||||
| Ease of use | ||||
| ASEAN readiness | ||||
| API quality | ||||
| Pricing | Freemium | Free | Freemium | Freemium |
| Free tier | Free publication search for individuals | Full access to all features for free | Basic: unlimited search + 2 automated reports/month; ~125-200M-paper corpus | Limited citation lookups and searches |
| Paid from | Enterprise custom pricing (Analytics) | — | Plus $12/mo; Pro $49/mo; Team $79/mo | $20/month (Premium) |
| Has API | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Open source | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Free to use | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Users | 1m+ researchers | 50m+ monthly visits | 200k+ researchers | 15000+ institutions |
| Founded | — | — | 2018 | 2018 |
| Maker | Digital Science (Holtzbrinck) | Allen Institute for AI | Ought (non-profit) | Josh Nicholson, Domenic Rosati |
| Verdict | Dimensions links publications, grants, patents, clinical trials, datasets and policy documents into one citation graph — the grant and funding linkage is what genuinely separates it from Scopus and Web of Science. The fr... |
Semantic Scholar, run by the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI, indexes over 236 million papers and ranks them by meaning rather than keyword overlap, which is where it beats Google Scholar's plain matching. The TLDR one-... |
Elicit owns the literature-review niche: it searches 138 million papers, pulls methods, sample sizes and findings into structured comparison tables, and links every extraction back to source text, which makes verificatio... |
Scite's core idea — classifying whether a citing paper actually supports, contradicts, or just name-checks a claim — is still the sharpest tool in academic citation analysis, and Smart Citations make it fast to see how w... |
| Full review → | Full review → | Full review → | Full review → |
Comparisons cover up to 4 tools. Scores are RECATOOLS editorial assessments; verify current pricing on each vendor's site.