Semantic Scholar Expanding with Biomedical Lit

November 29, 2017

Academic publishing is the black hole of the publishing world.  While it is a prestigious honor to have your work published by a scholar press or journal, it will not have a high circulation.  One reason that academic material is blocked behind expensive paywalls and another is that papers are not indexed well.  Tech Crunch has some good news for researchers: “Allen institute For AI’s Semantic Scholar Adds Biomedical Papers To Its AI-Sorted Corpus.”

The Allen Institute for AI started the Semantic Scholar is an effort to index scientific literature with NLP and other AI algorithms.  Semantic Scholar will now include biomedical texts in the index.  There is way too much content available for individuals to read and create indices.  AI helps catalog and create keywords for papers by scanning an entire text, pulling key themes, and adding it to the right topic.

There’s so much literature being published now, and it stretches back so far, that it’s practically impossible for a single researcher or even a team to adequately review it. What if a paper from six years ago happened to note a slight effect of a drug byproduct on norepinephrine production, but it wasn’t a main finding, or was in a journal from a different discipline?

Scientific studies are being called into question, especially when the tests are funded by corporate entities.  It is important to verify truth from false information as we consume more and more each day.  Tools like Semantic Scholar are key to uncovering the truth.  It is too bad it does not receive more attention.

Whitney Grace, November 29, 2017

 

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