Comment by tom_hartke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tom_hartke | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Semantic Scholar seems more focused on 1. being the data provider/aggregator for the research community, and 2. long term, I think they plan to develop software at the reading interface that learns as a researcher uses it to browse papers (a rich PDF reader, with hyperlinks, TLDRs, citation contexts, and a way to track your interactions over time, and remind you of what you've seen or not).

Their core feature now is a fast keyword search engine, but they also have a few advanced search features through their API (https://api.semanticscholar.org/api-docs/) like recommendations from positive/negative examples, but neither KW search nor these other systems are currently high enough quality to be very useful for us.

FYI our core dataset for now is provided by Semantic Scholar, so hugely thankful for their data aggregation pipeline and open access/API.

Do you plan on adding an API? I already have an inhouse knowledge discovery, annotation and search system that could be augmented by your service. Not super critical at this point, but a would be nice.

And yes, Semantic Scholar is a wonderful part of the academic commons. Fingers crossed they don't go down the jstor/oclc path.

I've used undermind for literature search and it was very precise! Thanks for the product! I wonder how you plan to extend the search to full paper content (will Semantic Scholar api allow this) - and do you plan to connect more datasets (which ones)? (many of them are paid...)

We'll certainly be able to include open access full texts, which is already a substantial fraction of the published papers, and a growing fraction too, as the publishing industry is rapidly moving toward open access. Paywalled full text search would require working with the publishers, which is more involved.

Great! I can definitely ask undermind for an overview paper of the scientific information landscape, unless you have a favourite in quick access to share?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com