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velifer t1_iwqalga wrote

Now you can take a quote completely out of context EVEN FASTER THAN EVER!!

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mjkjg2 t1_iwqn3hj wrote

and with studies that have flawed experimental designs! double-whammy

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floydly t1_iwqdquo wrote

This only kind of works. IME they take snippets from discussion where authors are discussing ways their work could be wrong sometimes.

Gotta read abstracts at minimum, sorry gang.

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ARoyaleWithCheese t1_iwqfgj4 wrote

I don't know how it could ever work in any useful way. Why would you need answers from research papers only to completely disregard the integrity of the scientific method? There are basically no definitive answers within science as there are almost always contradicting results, theories or interpretations.

If you need a quick answer, just use Google to find whatever the current prevalent opinion is in popular science.

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Racially-Ambiguous t1_iwqh3qy wrote

Right? What are the parameters of the study? Is it a meta-analysis, randomized controlled, a large enough sample size, were participants actually monitored etc? A study is useless to me if they had the participants do things at home rather than under supervision.

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Unsd t1_iwqt9u3 wrote

And there are already resources that gets exactly this information. I know my mom uses something for this in clinical research.

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Samarium149 t1_iwtezyd wrote

Yes. It's called Google Scholar and then reading the paper.

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Unsd t1_iwubs8n wrote

Well sure, but literature review for pharmaceuticals, for example, can take a stupid long time so there are tools that make it faster.

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Bagelman0108 t1_iwrm2if wrote

Lol "scientific method integrity" very funny my guy

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UserNamesCantBeTooLo t1_iws55hx wrote

Are you trying to say something here? If you're trying to say the scientific method doesn't work, how do you think the technology underlying the device you used to comment was invented?

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frankferri t1_iwsivsi wrote

I think on a fundamental level we don't really know? Iirc we don't understand charge on a fundamental level- we've gotten gravity, but circuits are still more engineering than science imo

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UserNamesCantBeTooLo t1_iwsxbb0 wrote

That's exactly backward. Electromagnetism is much better understood than gravity. In a way you could say we don't understand either at a fundamental level, but the way you're using that idea here is just taking the fact that there's always more to discover, and trying to enlarge it into a false narrative of exaggerated ignorance.

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frankferri t1_iwu90t5 wrote

I'm in med school, I more than most ppl really do sit on the shoulders of giants. Just trying to encourage a sense of humility as in clinical practice EBM / a mountain of rcts is more something that helps you sleep at night instead of the sword you'll die on

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ronaldwreagan t1_iwqea84 wrote

Can a search engine give reliable answers about scientific research?

https://scite.ai/search?mode=question-answering&page=1&q=Can%20a%20search%20engine%20give%20reliable%20answers%20about%20scientific%20research%3F&utm_medium=web&utm_source=sciteqa

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15pH t1_iwrwnie wrote

Very well played. The irony is delicious.

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PrincePryda t1_iwsyv6c wrote

But in doing so, it provided the appropriate answer. This seems paradoxical lol

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lornecrew t1_iwv77kg wrote

While ironic, it did answer your question.

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[deleted] t1_iwqr59w wrote

[deleted]

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JoshN1986 OP t1_iwqs1g5 wrote

The excerpts are taken directly from research articles, they are not generated by AI. How does this "hand the reins of understanding to a computer"? How does surfacing excerpts and abstracts based on a search or a question worse than just returning titles?

Moreover, with each answer, there are citations so you can see how and why that article returned has been cited. We aim to increase critical thinking by surfacing conversations amongst papers, not just a list of citations we all treat equally.

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[deleted] t1_iwqsif7 wrote

[deleted]

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JoshN1986 OP t1_iwqt9da wrote

So it is safer to hide the information and only return titles? Do you view full-text search as harmful? Do you advocate for paywalls to keep the public out? Do you have the same issues with Google Scholar that shows excerpts? These excerpts are not standalone, they are linked directly to the full-text articles.

Seems as if you are portraying this as something that is not. It's a discovery engine where you can search using boolean operators or ask questions. The results are peer-reviewed articled titles, excerpts, and abstracts. I fundamentally disagree that that is somehow harmful to understanding or critical thinking. It makes research more accessible.

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jaam01 t1_iwrbp34 wrote

>When you hand the reins of your understanding to a computer, you forfeit your ability to make sense of the world and surrender it to whoever programmed the tool you’re using.

This concern is overflow. That's exactly what we are doing by using search engines on the first place. Unless open source, we don't know how the algorithm works, we don't know what to they prioritize or censor. Google even offered to do a censored search engine for China, proyect firefly, we don't know if they don't use a similar type of technology in their main search engines. That logic also applies with the people behind the result that the engine provides. We don't know their motives, biases, conflict of interests, unless you do a background check of every author of everything you read. Trust in scientists are in an all time low because now is easier to find all the BS scientists had said which put into question their credibility. I lost all respect for Neil deGrasse Tyson after all the disingenuous stuff he publishes in his Twitter, because he thinks he's an expert in everything.

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dr_keks t1_iwqf2nz wrote

Nice concept, but didn't work for me at all. My questions came up with irrelevant answers and papers. Worse than if I'd just put in some keywords into Google scholar and taking the first hit.

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JoshN1986 OP t1_iwqngs1 wrote

You can also do a keyword-based search, which can be a lot more comprehensive and in many cases will be better. If you can share the questions where it didn't work well, that would help us make improvements.

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velifer t1_iwqqv30 wrote

Since it's an actively harmful app with a core purpose to subvert critical review of scientific papers and only pull decontextualized snippets, the best thing you could do would be take it down.

This is a tool that is designed only to streamline confirmation bias.

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JoshN1986 OP t1_iwqreg9 wrote

I disagree with your harsh assessment and really your tone. We show citation context, which makes it easy to see how and why a paper has been cited in the literature, including if it has been supported or contrasted by other studies.

With scite, you can see if a paper has been supported/challenged.
Without scite, you only see a list of citing articles.

How does that streamline confirmation bias?

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velifer t1_iwuqxw9 wrote

>really your tone.

Zero fucks given. The mountain does not care if you believe in it. I don't care if you think I'm an asshole.

Reality doesn't change because you don't like the messenger, douche.

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smatchimo t1_iwrc5da wrote

I feel like I can get similar results with google by simply adding + .pdf to keyword searches.

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hreloaded t1_iwqs816 wrote

It kinda works! Question:

>What is the best beer in UK?

3rd result:

>Shit happens, but you have a job to do

>The Horse and Groom is a friendly Cotswolds country pub that has consistently won UK 'best public house' awards since 2009.

1rst result was "The introduction of the concept of dementia praecox into Spain, 1902—19" though.

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LingonberryDry3814 t1_iwrtiqj wrote

Question: Who is the president of the United States? Answers received included Lincoln, Clinton, Reagan, Trump… then I stopped scanning.

This is an atrocity. People will type in a question and think the answers they’re given are accurate, but they’re likely to be totally misleading.

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JoshN1986 OP t1_iwrtxs3 wrote

An atrocity? Lol, those are all indeed Presidents of the US, no? How is it totally misleading?

You seem to think that people are extremely stupid and cant read or reason at all.

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LingonberryDry3814 t1_iwrzpnb wrote

They HAVE BEEN presidents of the US. However, time evolves our understanding of things, and this site you’ve built doesn’t account for that.

You can’t make a “tool” for bypassing actual thinking, reading, and research and then claim that outcome isn’t its intended purpose.

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JoshN1986 OP t1_iws08t6 wrote

Do you think we worked to index millions of full-text articles over years to bypass actual thinking, reading, and research? Come on! You're being disingenuous here and trying to tear down work just for the sake of it. We want to enhance reading, discovery, and understanding, so we have made it easier to search or ask questions of research. We welcome constructive feedback, but your example is clearly not an "atrocity," as you describe it. I get it though it's reddit and everyone wants to comment some "gotcha!"

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LingonberryDry3814 t1_iws14d6 wrote

I’m sure you’ve put a lot of work into this, and it’s hard to hear negative feedback. I hope that with some time and distance, you’ll see how this contributes to misinformation and the general destruction of nuanced knowledge. I’m a researcher. I can see how this would mangle my messages. I’m not impressed.

ETA: I think what a lot of people are reacting to is the claim that you’re getting “an answer”. I’ve been in academia for over a decade. (A) it doesn’t work like that, and (b) I know my students. People love to think they have an answer, when all they have is decontextualized phrase-salad.

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UShouldntSayThat t1_iwrded7 wrote

I asked "when did we discover the world was round" and got linked to a paper about "A More Democratic Liberalism"

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jjcollier t1_iwrw8nv wrote

This works well at returning relevant abstracts for the test questions I asked. However, it didn't give me "an answer" to any of them, just the abstracts of papers where I might be able to find the answer. In that regard, it doesn't offer much beyond existing resources for search.

Next time I have a genuine research question I'll try it out again and see how it compares to my usual methods.

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JoshN1986 OP t1_iwrwl79 wrote

Thanks for the actual constructive criticism! Please do try it out and compare it with other sources. You can also just search our 1.2b excerpts without formulating it as a question: https://scite.ai/search?mode=all

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Arthur_Dent_42_121 t1_iwsqllx wrote

Scientist here (completely unaffiliated with scite). I haven't tried this feature, but use scite.ai occasionally - though I haven't bothered to get a subscription. It's a fairly helpful tool; finding dissenting opinions is tedious to do manually, and it does a pretty good job of exposing any controversy about a certain result.

I hope they get some traction.

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werpicus t1_iwshsh9 wrote

Science Direct already does this… and it isn’t very useful…

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Javerlin t1_iwssoa4 wrote

Are these the people that tried to advertise their tool on reddit and sank?

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ECatPlay t1_iwqo88c wrote

Agree completely with u/velifer and u/floydly. But with that in mind I got very reasonable results when I tried checking up on an old research interest of mine with:

"is semibullvalene homoaromatic?"

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drugsr4lozers t1_iwqwgk1 wrote

Stop being lazy and start reading

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15pH t1_iwrxqbj wrote

Many (most?) people do not have the education required to understand scientific journal articles, which use highly specific terms that are often unknown to anyone outside the field as well as critical statistical evaluations.

"Stop being lazy" is a take that is both incredibly ignorant and incredibly elitist.

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drugsr4lozers t1_iws0syu wrote

Public libraries exist

Internet exists

Free articles on the internet exist

Free internet exists for low income families

Ways to circumvent the paywall exists

Khan Academy exists

Quality YouTube lectures exist

Pointing fingers and calling people whatever “-ists” you’ve heard through the grapevine is a take that is both incredibly narrow-minded, and, well, lazy

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2Sugoi4U t1_ix1yd9v wrote

A lawyer could tell me it's my fault I don't know the law or how to read legalese in contracts, something he spent years to master. Most people have better or more important things to do than read research papers.

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djdefenda t1_iwrw3yd wrote

This is just google scholar but doesn't seem to answer any of my questions.

Assuming this was working, why would someone need it when they can install the google scholar browser extension?

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JoshN1986 OP t1_iwrwc2t wrote

The key differences:
- You can ask a question in plain language or search with boolean operators (can't do that in GS)
- We show three sentence excerpts from full-text articles, and GS only shows fragmented sentence excerpts to show how your search matched.

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djdefenda t1_iwrwwcu wrote

>boolean operators

I've been using them in Google and Google Scholar for a long time

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JoshN1986 OP t1_iwrxbvd wrote

You are right, those are supported. GS is a great resource, we're just trying to help and move things forward. GS has not done much in 15 years, and arguably, more could be done. We will experiment, listen, and keep refining.

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djdefenda t1_iwrzgzc wrote

I would really love to see an integration of science, or at least my fields of interest (agriculture, aquaculture, soil science, chemistry, botany, biology) but I would really like to see it work with something like Siri.....

ie; I want an AI Digital Assistant that can do what Google, GS AND Siri does, combined with some additional basic tasks like reminders, alarms, taking notes etc.

I think a free version of this would take off, , and perhaps a professional paid version would be purchased by people that work in the relevant industries which would support you and your team, as well as the free users.

For example - I have a diary which I use, I always have notepads and pieces of paper here and there, I have whiteboards, my computer and files of course, and then my books, google etc etc - I need to have them all amalgamated and backed up, shared across my devices.....I want a digital assistant to do that!

example continued; - I am in the back paddock of the farm and I am planting a new variety of tomatoes.........

A digital assistant would, at my voice prompt, record the time, date, variety and location of the plant. It would also save any notes that I may mention, let's say soggy ground, or hard clay......

The digital assistant, at any time I asked, could tell me what is planted at any location, and when etc etc

It would remind me when to prune or harvest.....it could give me tips or instructions of prompted.

It could have access to my last soil test and make recommendations.

It could tell me good companion plants, it would know the sun directions, upcoming weather.

It could regularly scan news articles and alert me when anything relevant to this tomato and it's environment appears.

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djdefenda t1_iws0c3m wrote

>The issue of getting access to papers and using them for more than just reading them one at a time is something groups have advocated for decades.

I'm going to assume this is all legal issues.

I wonder if you could set up shop in Sweden and let your AI sweep ZLibrary??!!!

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offwalls t1_iwqu94x wrote

I was being very mature and typed in studies about pussy and there's where I learned that there's a flower called Pussy willow .

Just beautiful.

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protocol113 t1_iws1wzk wrote

Now someone write a bot that takes just the text snippet produced by this and turns it into a bastardized click bait article title.

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bot_exe t1_iwsll1p wrote

this is actually pretty good, similar results to google scholar but brings up relevant blurbs quicker, makes selecting relevant papers faster.

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kriel t1_iwt8j52 wrote

I feel really bad for OP... They really fumbled the headline on this one and it's inciting a lot of strong reactions.

Look at their post history. A year ago they were talking up this cool tool:

"A smart citation index that displays the context of citations and classifies their intent using deep learning"

"We extracted 900M citation statements from 26M full-text scientific articles. You can now search all of them directly"

And they've gotten relatively little traction on it. A few upvotes, a comment here or there...

But then they get cocky with this headline, implying that any user could effectively use this tool, and that the tool would wildly overdeliver.

I'm not a scientist. Not even an armchair one. And to be honest, I don't know much about research papers and how they cite each other.

But I can see the value of "Search for something, find related papers, and see who's citing who and a good guess at whether they've been supported or contrasted by the citation.

... I also see they're using paywalls, though... so it's not like they're giving this away.

But try and see it's merits, even if it can't even hope to live up to the headline it's been presented with.

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rustyhaben t1_iwu6556 wrote

I’ve used the Consensus AI search. It summarizes journal articles! Shorter than rearing abstracts.

Recommended it to my therapist. :)

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tayy0057 t1_iwqzamj wrote

Look interesting but the monthly cost is on the high side

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JoshN1986 OP t1_iwqzodf wrote

We offer 40% off discounts if students/researchers recommend us to their university (we prefer they pay anyways). With the discount, it is 9 dollars a month. Without 20 if you pay monthly or 16 if you pay annually.

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Hoserkid17 t1_iwq5bao wrote

This function is super cool. Thanks for posting.

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parajbaigsen t1_iws36jg wrote

Sorry, but I don't understand the negative reaction to this post. Is the tool not useful to find articles to read about on any topic?

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Ljc4457 t1_iwq752b wrote

Thank you!

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Eco_Ranger t1_iwqhydo wrote

It's nice. Will try it more later.

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sohu86 t1_iwqebvf wrote

This is very helpful - thanks for sharing!

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