Using AI to Gain Context for Scientific Research

> Nicholson: With scite, we’re working to introduce Smart Citations. These citations provide the context for each citation and its meaning. For example, we want to know whether the citation provides supporting or contradicting evidence – not just the metrics of how many times it has been previously cited, viewed, or downloaded. This allows people to look at a study and quickly determine if it has been supported or contradicted.

> Nicholson: We decided to do this because Wikipedia is often the first and only stop for many people trying to understand something better. We found that most cited articles (58%) are uncited or untested by subsequent studies, while the remainder show wide variability in contradicting or supporting evidence (2- 40%). This sounds bad, but is actually not too different from all scientific articles in general. Indeed, scientific articles on Wikipedia receive more supporting citations than the scientific literature as a whole.

Would you like to do this kind of innovative use on the corpus of scientific articles? Yeah, you can't without specific partnerships, because that corpus is spread between various publishers and locked behind paywalls. (Who have not contributed a dime towards actually doing the research in question.)

So if you're an academic, please stop working with closed-access venues; and if you're a citizen demand the right to access and redistribute the results of publicly-funded research.