5 ms·

It'd be interesting if we could break down academic papers into stand-alone facts, which could be cited more succinctly than the paragraphs of prose that we do

by acbart 12y ago

It'd be interesting if we could break down academic papers into stand-alone facts, which could be cited more succinctly than the paragraphs of prose that we do now. Ideally, this would look more like academic proofs, and it'd be easier to argue and discuss components of a given paper. I'm sure that a good amount of beautiful subtext would be lost, but might it be worth it to have a more accurate way of linking knowledge?

danieltillett 12y ago
This could now be accomplished by providing an offset (say number of characters from the start) to where the information cited can be found. What I find more of an issue is when trying to track down the source of some “fact” is going three or four papers up the citation chain and finding the paper at the end doesn’t actually say what the starting paper claims.
- judk 12y ago
  Thanks for summarizing the OP.
- romaniv 12y ago
  This sounds like a problem that hyper-links should have solved.
hackuser 12y ago
> It'd be interesting if we could break down academic papers into stand-alone facts, which could be cited more succinctly than the paragraphs of prose that we do now. Perhaps there could be some kind of semantic syntax that would group together the factual claim and supporting information (data and references). For example, <"e=mc^2",cite1,cite2,data1,data2> The claims still could be included in prose, but also easily extracted, analyzed, manipulated, etc. With a little work the claims could form a semantic web, with all that entails, and the validity of cites could be checked automatically when the document is opened or on a regular basis, updating the claim appropriately. For example, the UI could display the claim differently based on whether the cited source has been withdrawn, partially invalidated, superseded, confirmed, rarely cited, heavily cited, based on impact factor, if the source's own citations have been invalidated (e.g., claimC cites claimB which cites claimA; if claimA is invalidated, there should be some sort of indication in claimC -- consider that the invalidation of a seminal claimA would set off a massive chain reaction, as it should), etc. But that all seems obvious and I suspect I'm not the first to think of it.
- jasonpriem 12y ago
  It is indeed interesting, and as you suspect it has attracted some attention. Check out "nanopubs,"(http://nanopub.org http://nanopub.org), or Simon Buckingham Shum's very cool work on ScholOnto (http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/scholonto/ http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/scholonto/) among others.
- stevewilhelm 12y ago
  Microformats were popular back when blogging was new. [1] http://microformats.org/wiki/citation http://microformats.org/wiki/citation
- rdtsc 12y ago
  That approach has been tried and in the bioinformatics community years ago. Basically scanning published papers that mentioned genes relationship and extracting them in order to build a graph. Say someone publishes "T3SS1 induces cell death" so you can now add an edge to a graph "T3SS1->autofaghy" or something like that.
vacri 12y ago
Please, no. The twitterification of academic papers would be terrible - all subtext and nuance would be lost. This is seen already with 'science journalism': a scientist reports an effect, couched with appropriate caveats, but a journalist then rips that effect free of any nuance or context and states it as fact. It can be highly (and sometimes intentionally) misleading.
- GrumpySimon 12y ago
  Exactly, and it's not like papers are collections of 'facts' that can be extracted anyway. Papers are long arguments based on some data choices, some analysis choices, and followed by interpretations --- none of which are 'facts', and all of which are debatable.
nraynaud 12y ago
I am thinking in the exact opposite direction: stop this publication influence, citations SEO and plagiarism madness. Get shit done and put it on your blog. Normal people hear ideas, forget them, internalize them and regurgitate them as their own all the time. While you're scouring databases and calling libraries to try to find who's got access to the paper you're looking for because it looks like a primary source of what you're working on, you could be experimenting from secondary sources or even from textbooks if the thing is now mainstream enough.
- judk 12y ago
  OK what if the experimental setup is hard to replicate and I just make up attractive sounding claims for for my blog with flashy graphics and a folksy charming writing style?
  - nraynaud 12y ago
    what's the difference with today? You didn't fight for the author's order and you didn't spent months on publication issue, but your bullshit is still in the wild. If you want to be in Nature today, you need attractive claims and flashy graphics already. And the peer review is just not working, they are favoring already famous people and ideas.
    - ganeumann 12y ago
      > If you want to be in Nature today, you need attractive claims and flashy graphics already. And the peer review is just not working, they are favoring already famous people and ideas. Citation?
jsweojtj 12y ago
While I can imagine that being amazing if that could be done well, but it seems like a really difficult problem to get right. I would prefer an approach like PaperBricks caught on instead: http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.3523 http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.3523 -- where a single section of a current paper could be published by itself. I think it would be both amazingly useful and could speed up the iteration rate of science substantially.

by acbart 12y ago

danieltillett 12y ago

This could now be accomplished by providing an offset (say number of characters from the start) to where the information cited can be found. What I find more of an issue is when trying to track down the source of some “fact” is going three or four papers up the citation chain and finding the paper at the end doesn’t actually say what the starting paper claims.

judk 12y ago
Thanks for summarizing the OP.
romaniv 12y ago
This sounds like a problem that hyper-links should have solved.

hackuser 12y ago

> It'd be interesting if we could break down academic papers into stand-alone facts, which could be cited more succinctly than the paragraphs of prose that we do now. Perhaps there could be some kind of semantic syntax that would group together the factual claim and supporting information (data and references). For example, <"e=mc^2",cite1,cite2,data1,data2> The claims still could be included in prose, but also easily extracted, analyzed, manipulated, etc. With a little work the claims could form a semantic web, with all that entails, and the validity of cites could be checked automatically when the document is opened or on a regular basis, updating the claim appropriately. For example, the UI could display the claim differently based on whether the cited source has been withdrawn, partially invalidated, superseded, confirmed, rarely cited, heavily cited, based on impact factor, if the source's own citations have been invalidated (e.g., claimC cites claimB which cites claimA; if claimA is invalidated, there should be some sort of indication in claimC -- consider that the invalidation of a seminal claimA would set off a massive chain reaction, as it should), etc. But that all seems obvious and I suspect I'm not the first to think of it.

jasonpriem 12y ago
It is indeed interesting, and as you suspect it has attracted some attention. Check out "nanopubs,"(http://nanopub.org http://nanopub.org), or Simon Buckingham Shum's very cool work on ScholOnto (http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/scholonto/ http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/scholonto/) among others.
stevewilhelm 12y ago
Microformats were popular back when blogging was new. [1] http://microformats.org/wiki/citation http://microformats.org/wiki/citation
rdtsc 12y ago
That approach has been tried and in the bioinformatics community years ago. Basically scanning published papers that mentioned genes relationship and extracting them in order to build a graph. Say someone publishes "T3SS1 induces cell death" so you can now add an edge to a graph "T3SS1->autofaghy" or something like that.

vacri 12y ago

Please, no. The twitterification of academic papers would be terrible - all subtext and nuance would be lost. This is seen already with 'science journalism': a scientist reports an effect, couched with appropriate caveats, but a journalist then rips that effect free of any nuance or context and states it as fact. It can be highly (and sometimes intentionally) misleading.

GrumpySimon 12y ago
Exactly, and it's not like papers are collections of 'facts' that can be extracted anyway. Papers are long arguments based on some data choices, some analysis choices, and followed by interpretations --- none of which are 'facts', and all of which are debatable.

nraynaud 12y ago

I am thinking in the exact opposite direction: stop this publication influence, citations SEO and plagiarism madness. Get shit done and put it on your blog. Normal people hear ideas, forget them, internalize them and regurgitate them as their own all the time. While you're scouring databases and calling libraries to try to find who's got access to the paper you're looking for because it looks like a primary source of what you're working on, you could be experimenting from secondary sources or even from textbooks if the thing is now mainstream enough.

judk 12y ago
OK what if the experimental setup is hard to replicate and I just make up attractive sounding claims for for my blog with flashy graphics and a folksy charming writing style?
- nraynaud 12y ago
  what's the difference with today? You didn't fight for the author's order and you didn't spent months on publication issue, but your bullshit is still in the wild. If you want to be in Nature today, you need attractive claims and flashy graphics already. And the peer review is just not working, they are favoring already famous people and ideas.
  - ganeumann 12y ago
    > If you want to be in Nature today, you need attractive claims and flashy graphics already. And the peer review is just not working, they are favoring already famous people and ideas. Citation?

jsweojtj 12y ago

While I can imagine that being amazing if that could be done well, but it seems like a really difficult problem to get right. I would prefer an approach like PaperBricks caught on instead: http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.3523 http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.3523 -- where a single section of a current paper could be published by itself. I think it would be both amazingly useful and could speed up the iteration rate of science substantially.