This physics today editorial talks about a study which found that as the number of paper in a field increases, it becomes increasingly difficult for researchers to recognize innovative work and progress, as a result, stalls. This got me into thinking about different ways to mitigate this issue:
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Parsing journal articles faster?
- Some journals include a ‘Plain Language Summary of article’ or ‘Significance of work’ in the abstract section of the paper. These are usually provided by the authors and might help readers parse information faster (although with some clear loss in details). Here are a few journals which have implemented some form of this:
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Asking AI to summarize
- A while ago, I stumbled upon this python module called Sumy and an online web summarizer (ExplainToMe) which were able to summarize contents of HTML pages and documents into a few sentences. And quite frankly. their performance was surprisingly good. Another way to address this issue might be invoke the machines and use NLP to solve this issue.
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Online journal clubs
- A more “unbiased” alternative to summarizing articles might be through online discussion (via YouTube, Reddit, twitter, forums, etc). I find Fermat’s library implementation for such a routine quite ideal. They discuss one interesting research article per week but also allow others to annotate and highlight.
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