New Rankings Method Addresses Longstanding Limitation In Traditional Academic Evaluation Methods, Providing New Insight Into Research Impact & Veracity
HENDERSON, Nev., Oct. 8, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Research Solutions (NASDAQ: RSSS), a leading provider of AI-powered scientific research tools, today announced the launch of Scite Rankings, the first global research ranking system built on artificial intelligence-driven citation analysis.
Unlike traditional rankings that reward citation volume alone, Scite Rankings evaluates how research is cited, whether work is supported, contrasted, or simply mentioned, offering a more accurate and trustworthy measure of scientific influence across institutions, journals, and disciplines.
"For decades, research evaluation has been shaped by blunt instruments like Impact Factor and h-Index, which treat all citations equally," said Dr. Josh Nicholson, Chief Strategy Officer at Research Solutions. "Scite Rankings signals a turning point. By assessing not just how often work is cited but the quality and context of those citations, we enable universities, investors, and policymakers to make evidence-based decisions about where to direct resources and build partnerships."
At the heart of the system is Scite's Smart Citations technology, which has processed more than 1.4 billion citation statements, creating the world's largest database of contextualized citation intelligence. This sophisticated AI categorizes citations as supporting, contrasting, or neutral, revealing a detailed picture of how research is received and validated by the scientific community.
The result is the Scite Index, a next-generation metric that blends traditional bibliometrics with citation context. Early results show dramatic differences from conventional rankings. For example, while the University of Michigan places 47th in Times Higher Education's 2025 quality rankings and 21st in Shanghai's publication-based system, it ranks 8th in Scite's system due to the high proportion of supporting citations earned by its researchers.
"This is more than a new ranking. It is a new lens on the reliability of science," said Sean Rife, Head of Academic Relations for Scite. "By emphasizing replicability and research reliability, we provide funders, governments, and investors with a clear line of sight into which institutions are delivering dependable research outcomes."
For researchers, Scite Rankings delivers recognition for producing high-quality, reproducible work. For investors and research managers, it creates actionable intelligence for allocating capital, shaping collaborations, and reducing risk in a market where research quality directly impacts funding and innovation pipelines.
Full details of the methodology, including validation studies, are available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05206.
Review the complete Scite Rankings database at https://scite.ai/rankings.
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.
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For more information, visit https://www.researchsolutions.com.

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