> Perhaps we need an army of (paid?) dogsbodies to manually go through every paper ever published and assess the sentiment behind each citation? This is simila

> Perhaps we need an army of (paid?) dogsbodies to manually go through every paper ever published and assess the sentiment behind each citation? This is similar to what SciFinder, a database created by the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) does for every paper. They have a substantial team that parses through every journal of significance where chemical research might be published. They are searching for chemical structures and substances and encoding each structure within their proprietary database. That database offers a concrete value to researchers at companies, universities, and law firms, whether looking for prior art or simply the most reliable methods of synthesis. Hence that product is greatly valued by those who use it and they can pay for people to do the complex task of indexing those papers. While the idea of determining the sentiment of references is interesting, I'm skeptical whether there is nearly the same level of potential commercial value in creating such a database. It would be useful for reviewing grant applications, but those reviewers tend to be experts who already know if a paper received negative attention in the literature or even just on Twitter.