Do you feel as though you are lost amid the multitude of scholarly journal articles? Just treading water just before the next major advance in the discipline goes by with no notice? You set up your alert for papers published each week. You read through the abstracts of the articles to see if you are interested in the paper. However, most of the truly game-changing ideas that link separate dots or challenge long-standing assumptions in your discipline do not cross your path in your daily electronic search for new articles. The only type of research you conduct is reactive research that can be compared to playing catch-up after you have missed an opportunity. However, imagine if your research feed could go from being a passive email to be an active partner to help you advance your research. Not only would possible be able to receive papers, but you could also receive guidance in order to better understand new research and also to see new ways of thinking about the field.
Insightpaper will revolutionize the way that researchers in your discipline conduct their research by providing scholars with the same service. It is not just an aggregator; it is an intelligence engine that will connect proactively through the innovative delivery of cutting edge advancement in your discipline directly to you.
The basis of this shift is the transition from matching keywords to understanding context. Traditional search tools are great reference librarians since they will return exactly what you asked for. Insightpaper wants to be a great co-worker — one who has read all of the material within the library, and who can come and say, “I know you are working on subject X, have you considered the following work related to subject Y? It uses a methodology that may help you with problem Z.” Through a process of proactive delivery, this technology uses deep semantic processing. The software does not merely search for the terms that you preset in your search; rather, it develops a dynamic model of your intellectual interests and understands the reasons behind your questions. It also visualizes the relationships of ideas, authors, and methods by means of concepts. When a preprint covers your core research question from a different point of view and doesn’t explicitly state that point, insight paper will recognize the relationship and the potential for a significant breaking discovery where a simple search would find only unrelated material.
From Alerts to Anticipation: The Proactive Engine
The ability to predict what a researcher may need and discover will be revolutionary to the entire research process. Instead of waiting for you to find a gap in the literature, Insightpaper provides the opportunity for you to find information quickly. For example, if you’re studying the role of a specific protein involved in cellular metabolism and you receive an alert when the tenth paper comes out this month that describes the same pathway, that is incrementally helpful. If you use Insightpaper, you might receive an alert about a recently published article in a material science journal describing a new nanoprobe. You may not have connected the dots, but this nanoprobe could allow you to see your protein in action. This type of information is revolutionary because it provides you with a new methodological approach to your work instead of just the typical incremental updates you’re getting in the literature. Our continuous exploration of the frontier is not about searching for what is popular. It is about searching for potential – potential connections, potential challenges to the way things have always been done and, finally, potential tools that we can borrow from other disciplines that may reside far from our own. It is this type of cross-pollination of ideas that generally creates some of the most innovative solutions…a system that is able to understand the context of all fields will continually provide opportunities for discovering new, innovative ideas.
Cultivating Serendipity in a Digital Landscape
Serendipity has long been viewed as an important contributor to intellectual discovery; however, it frequently relies solely on chance – whether by happenstance (e.g., seeing something on a bulletin board or having an accidental conversation at a conference coffee break). Insightpaper creates a structure for serendipitous discovery using the ability to create a basis of the academic universe and the interrelationships that exist. By factually mapping the connections, Insightpaper has the ability to find the “happy accidents” that are often a result of serendipity. For example, Insightpaper may find that the authors you have identified as “influencers” within your area of research are now adding citations from a related area. Once Insightpaper detects these “convergence events,” it can present you with an older (but still significant) seminal publication in that related area, thus providing you with the context you require to understand not only what has happened in respect to the emerging breakthrough, but also what has happened historically that has laid the groundwork for that emerging breakthrough. Additionally, through its ability to analyze citation networks and assess shifts in concepts across scholarly literature, Insightpaper can alert you to upcoming paradigm shifts prior to their becoming mainstream. It is capable of displaying the lesser-known, but still increasingly important papers from the past week or so; specifically, those which could potentially act as the foundation for your future theory of everything. Essentially, this transforms your feed from a record of the past to a radar for detecting future happenings.
Beyond the PDF: Delivering Synthesized Understanding
The synthesis phase is key in delivering every element of proactive breakthrough. Today’s researchers are inundated with an abundance of information, which makes it difficult for them to make sense of it all. In order for an intelligent feed to do its job well, it has to provide both the list of papers and the context for the papers, thereby providing a way for the reader to connect all of the relevant studies. This is how Insightpaper goes above and beyond; it not only offers concise summaries of the key points in each paper, but it also helps place each paper into context. For example, when a new important study appears, Insightpaper may add a note such as “This contradicts the earlier consensus based on [Landmark Paper, 2018],” or “This methodology is consistent with your private unpublished results”. It creates connections for the researcher by illustrating the debate, supporting or contradicting results, and creating a collection of their credentials into a continually expanding personal knowledge graph. You’re seeing your industry develop its story live rather than just collecting articles about it. Thus the system shows you how story is changing by pointing out plot changes and adding new characters. Therefore the insight paper is not only a delivery service; but also a narrator who will take you through the complicated storyline of how knowledge is advancing.
In the end, Insightpaper’s goal is to return time—time for in-depth thinking, creating, and testing—to researchers, their most precious resource. By removing the mentally exhausting and time-consuming aspects of information gathering (monitoring, filtering, initial synthesis) to be done by a forward-looking AI, researcher minds will really be able to use their vast potential and imagine, challenge, and connect on an even higher level. The breakthroughs will no longer be hidden within the overwhelming amount of research materials available to researchers. As a replacement, breakthroughs will be identified, contextualized, and clearly delivered to the researcher; changing your study feed from a source of anxiety into a source of constant, intelligent inspiration. The Path of discovery will not be paved with merely an increased number of documents to read, it will be able to understand the information in a timelier and more efficient manner. With a proactive (forward looking) tool to deliver insight to the researcher, the future of discovery is in the making, through relevant, breakthrough specific updates.
