> And so we loosened up and spent three weeks playing around with knowledge search and discovery outside of biomed. We built... [lists 5 more features]
> At that point, lots of postdocs had told us that some of the apps would have saved them months during their PhD, but actual viable customers were only moderately excited. It became clear that this would have to turn into another B2B SaaS specialized tool with a lot of software consulting and ongoing efforts from a sales team ...
It sounds like the authors spent 3-4 months, built a ton of stuff, and despite some traction (like post-docs saying it would save them months of effort) it wasn't high quality enough to sell to real customers. Did the authors really expect to solve such a difficult problem in such a short period of time? It seems a bit premature to declare that "literature review, search and knowledge discovery are just not that useful".