Having invested quite a bit of my own time into various aspects of the scientific knowledge extraction morass, I’d say the author is largely on point, but there

Having invested quite a bit of my own time into various aspects of the scientific knowledge extraction morass, I’d say the author is largely on point, but there’s a significant, and potentially valuable distinction to be made between extracting research outputs and research inputs. At least in the field of materials science, papers are by and large a record of research outputs. We made material X and it achieved performance Y - here are a bunch of measurements to prove that this is in fact what we made and that it truly achieved performance Y at relevant conditions, etc. In this sense, papers really function as an advertisement: look at what we achieved. What papers do not do is rigorously document inputs, or provide a step-by-step guide to reproduce said results, for obvious reasons. My current take on this topic is that it would be both feasible and valuable to build a knowledge extraction system to compile and compare outputs across a specified field. Think the big “chart of all verified solar cell efficiencies over time” [1], but generated automatically. This would at least immediately orient researchers to the distribution of state of the art results, and help ensure that they don’t omit relevant references in their reviews. But extracting and making sense of inputs (methods), or even “knowledge”? Forget about it. [1] https://www.nrel.gov/pv/cell-efficiency.html https://www.nrel.gov/pv/cell-efficiency.html