[HN Gopher] Inciteful: Using Citations to Explore Academic Liter...
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Inciteful: Using Citations to Explore Academic Literature
Author : adamnemecek
Score : 107 points
Date : 2020-12-19 18:21 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (inciteful.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (inciteful.xyz)
| weishuhn wrote:
| Creator here! Wasn't expecting this to happen :) The site is
| definitely still in Beta so I appreciate any and all feedback. I
| just launched it a few days ago. It's been my COVID project and I
| finally got to the point where I felt comfortable having others
| use it.
|
| The biggest hurdle was the speed of the graph creation. Basically
| taking a 250,000,000 paper/2,500,000 citaiton db and creating
| graphs that could be up to 200k papers and 3-4mm citations. For
| that I ended up learning/using Rust (which was a great
| experience).
|
| The plan is to keep it totally free and hopefully get some
| institutional support once I get a better handle on demand and
| costs.
|
| Ask me anything!
|
| EDIT: As you are going through the site, be sure to use the
| purple "+" buttons to create your own graphs centered on the
| topic of your choice. That combined with the in-graph keyword
| filters are probably the most powerful ways to quickly zero in on
| the most relevant literature.
| jonmoore wrote:
| Very nice work. I especially liked the ability to build up a
| collection of papers, that the response time was good, and that
| the SQL could be edited directly.
|
| Do you have any plans to add a graphical visualization of
| top/central papers?
| weishuhn wrote:
| That is the most requested feature and something I'm working
| on. It's a fun (and hard) design/data problem. Which of the
| 5k-150k papers do you show in the graph? And then how do you
| render them in a way that is both visually appealing but also
| conveys the most import information?
| feanaro wrote:
| Which crate are you using for graph manipulation?
| weishuhn wrote:
| I go through a lot of the details in my post on the Rust
| subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/kfiaqn/just
| _wanted_to...
|
| But long story short, I end up doing most of the graph
| analysis by passing in the citations, using PyO3, to graph-
| tool in python then returning the data I need about each
| paper. I am planning on moving that over to Rust. But not
| being an academic I wanted to get feedback on the quality of
| the results before making it difficult to quickly test
| different types of algorithms.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Are you planning on open sourcing parts of it?
| weishuhn wrote:
| Eventually I'd like to move the site to open source, but
| right now the repo isn't in a place where I can do that.
| As for specific parts, it's pretty purpose built and this
| is my first Rust project and so I'm not sure which parts
| would be helpful to the community. And I doubt they would
| meet the communities standards just yet :)
| adamnemecek wrote:
| It's better to open source sooner rather than later even
| if it's not in a place you'd want it to be. Like some of
| the work you have to do might be done by the community.
| [deleted]
| joshgev wrote:
| First impression is positive; relevant results and a reasonably
| straight-forward UI. I appreciate the warning about the slow-
| loading graph (which did load after a minute or two).
|
| Two things that might be tweaked:
|
| * The search didn't behave in an ergonomic way: I typed a query
| ("graph neural networks") and great relevant stuff came up
| immediately in the dropdown. When I hit enter, however, I got an
| error that read "Invalid search: Check your spelling, enter a
| DOI, or another paper identifier or." I would have expected my
| action to take me to a search results page that listed what I saw
| in the dropdown (which I regard as a preview of the top hits) so
| that I could peruse the selection carefully.
|
| * I wanted to load a paper to take a look at it and it took me a
| while to realize that I could click the "Yes" above "Open Access"
| to download it. Since one of the big use cases for a site like
| this is the eventual consumption of these papers, I suggest
| making a "read/download paper" call to action more explicit.
| weishuhn wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. #1 might be some sort of bug. #2 Good
| call!
| comex wrote:
| In case the creators of this site are reading, there are some
| grammatical issues with the front page copy:
|
| "on it's head" should be "on its head".
|
| "not only with" should be "with not only".
|
| "analysis'" should not have an apostrophe and should possibly be
| "analyses".
| weishuhn wrote:
| Much appreciated! I'll update it. I really hadn't anticipated
| much traffic. I was planning on doing an open beta but things
| have kind of taken on a life of their own (in a good way).
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Here's the original announcement
| https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/kfiaqn/just_wanted_to...
| nt2h9uh238h wrote:
| Cool idea, but I think I broke the search with quantum computing.
| No papers to download, no links, and no related pages. Just 404s
|
| https://inciteful.xyz/p/186039733?&keywords=hello&maxDistanc...
| whatshisface wrote:
| You had "hello" as a keyword. I removed it and saw a bunch of
| papers pop up.
| tmabraham wrote:
| Is this any better than Connected Papers?
| https://www.connectedpapers.com/
| weishuhn wrote:
| Creator here. It's similar in that it uses citations to make
| paper recommendations. But different in that I give you access
| to the entire paper graph rather try to distill it down to just
| a few. You can even write your own queries by clicking on the
| "SQL" button at the bottom of each table. I kind of view it as
| a Connected Papers for power users.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Relevant to my interests, thanks.
| currymj wrote:
| this seems very nice -- very polished and gives good results.
|
| I would like it if the bibtex entries had meaningful cite keys as
| opposed to long numbers. as is, it would be pretty difficult to
| actually write a paper using these bibtex files.
| weishuhn wrote:
| I am planning on making the info in the BibTex files a bit more
| robust. Right now I'm just adding what I have readily
| available. But in general, if you are using Zotero or Mendely,
| the functionality to enrich the metadata on the entries does a
| good job filling in the missing info.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 8 mentions of the 'graph' on the page. Zero renderings of the
| graph :(
|
| It _is_ a nice user interface and the reference material is
| useful and well presented. But when you get down to it, it 's
| linear lists about the characteristics of a semantic graph. As
| I've said many times, this is like describing a tree with a
| tabular catalog of its leaves. Graph navigation needs a graphical
| representation, because things like branchiness (node out-degree)
| and other factors are more easily shown than described.
|
| The basic problem with graph representation/ navigation/
| traversal is that there are many valid ways of looking at the
| graph and it's hard to render them all. Maybe try using a gutter
| to allow users to temporarily pin certain graph characteristics
| and render accordingly. In this context, sometimes I might be
| interested in the latest research that cites a paper, other times
| I might be looking to see who picked it up first, or to apply
| some sort of windowing function to a large spectrum of citations.
|
| But I want to _see_ the graph, even if I am looking for a
| particular leaf.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Curious about HN's rules on titles. How is the language relevant
| in any way to this particular post? That sure seems to be
| editorializing in an attempt to promote something other than the
| project itself (and obviously to get upvotes). Given the explicit
| rules against both editorializing and soliciting upvotes, I don't
| see why this title is allowed.
|
| > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is
| misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
|
| > Don't solicit upvotes, comments, or submissions.
| dang wrote:
| From an HN point of view Rust is so frequently discussed that
| it's probably better not to orient a submission like this in
| that direction--it will probably get sucked in the generic
| direction, and the diff here (new academic search engine) is
| more interesting.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?query=generic%20discussion%20by:dang...
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:da...
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?query=diffs%20by:dang&dateRange=all&...
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Below, I link to the original announcement which was posted to
| /r/rust. The author talks about the choice of Rust a bunch.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Okay, but my point still stands - that has nothing to do with
| what was posted to HN. That part was included in the title to
| get upvotes.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| It was included in the title since the author though that
| the language choice mattered.
| libria wrote:
| It does matter in the context of the author addressing
| the /r/rust community. If you had posted the reddit link
| instead this would make sense.
|
| But I don't think the language is relevant for the direct
| inciteful.xyz site itself. Better to submit both links
| separately than trying to combine them as they have
| different audiences.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Posting it twice is a terrible suggestion.
| dang wrote:
| Posting one and linking to the other in the comments, as
| you did, is the best way.
| tedunangst wrote:
| My first question was how much academic literature written in
| rust is there.
| chapium wrote:
| There may or may not be some interesting reasons for choosing
| rust, but also the original article does not even include Rust
| in the title. It seems like Rust is mentioned solely for
| attention in this case. Would "A better way to search through
| academic literature" have been popular? Probably. How about "A
| better way to search through academic literature written in
| Java"? I assume not.
|
| Regarding moderation, its a thankless task which I don't envy
| and its hard to draw a line over nitpicky article titles when
| one has been voted in already.
| jszymborski wrote:
| I'm a big fan of trying new search engines for academic research;
| I hopefully am more likely to break out of whatever search bubble
| I'm unaware I'm in.
|
| This one in particular had some very nice features, some of which
| are present in Semantic Scholar (my current favourite) but some
| which are certainly not.
|
| Recommending papers based on citation graphs is a good way to
| very quickly get up to speed with fields I'm not to familiar
| with, but I'm always wary that I'll end up back in the feedback
| loop of very few popular papers rising to the top while perfectly
| good papers go unseen because they weren't well cited in the year
| they were written.
|
| So I'll certainly keep an eye on this and give it a try, but I'm
| certainly still in the market for a "serendipity" slider on such
| recommendation engines.
| weishuhn wrote:
| If you have the chance, try the following:
|
| 1. Find a paper you like in a field you want to learn.
|
| 2. Use the keyword filters to filter down to papers that match
| your criteria.
|
| 3. Add a bunch of the interesting ones to a new graph using the
| purple "+" buttons.
|
| 4. On the "new" graph page, check out the similar papers
| section. If any of them are interesting, add those to the
| graph.
|
| 5. Repeat until you don't find anything else that is
| interesting.
|
| The similar papers section uses a link prediction algorithm
| that basically says, if two papers cite a bunch of the same
| papers, rank them higher BUT if the paper they cite, is cited a
| bunch of times, don't give that connection much weight. The net
| effect of this is that it doesn't really matter if the paper
| was highly cited, only that it cites the same niche of papers
| as the ones you just chose. Also, because of the temporal
| nature of academic literature, the papers it brings up tend to
| be the newer and harder to discover papers.
|
| The results are pretty great and it's as close to the
| "serendipity" slider that you'll get right now.
|
| EDIT: Formatting
| raister wrote:
| How do you make it work with arXiv documents - I'm
| copying/pasting the ID and it's not finding it. Bug or feature?
| PS: very good idea, cheers.
| weishuhn wrote:
| The database is about a month out of date right now. I am going
| to be updating it soon. You should be able to either put in the
| url or do arxiv:XXXX.XXXXX
| petschge wrote:
| I played a bit with the site and liked it. The one killer feature
| I might pay a few dollars per year for is to create a profile,
| with a few graphs attached and get a daily or weekly email when a
| new paper is published that fits well into one of my graphs. Feel
| free to add a monthly "the most important old paper that you have
| not read yet (or not read in the last 5 years)" email too.
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