Hyperlinks for all references would be a good start. Finding some way to make some automatic glossary of definitions of technical terms would make scientific papers substantially more accessible too.
So let's say paper A cites paper B. If you look at paper B, we show you:
- how many times it was cited
- the direct paragraphs from paper A where it was cited
- the sections from paper A where paper B was referenced
- ... and a lot more
You can also now search these citation statements directly to find evidence-based information pretty quickly.
- Short video to showcase that search: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYjCn-4uMJk
- Website with a bit more details: https://citation.to/
You can also visualize citation networks similar to ConnectedPapers, set notifications for new citations on groups of papers you're interested in, and much more.
(Disclaimer -- I work here!)
Well, I definitely agree with your sentiment in a normative sense that scientific papers should be free and readily accessible to all -- in part because a lot of it is funded through tax dollars!
But given the current state of affairs, we're looking at making that information accessible to people without having to pay exorbitant fees to access individual research. We also offer steep discounts for students or anyone in academia.
With that in mind I would push back a little that we're just a scientific paper search engine -- our system does a lot of work in extracting and classifying those citation statements, which makes it more powerful than traditional scientific search engines.
And besides just using our search, a huge time-saving value of our service is the report pages which helps you quickly build a qualitative understanding of how something was cited.
Even if all scientific papers were freely accessible, our report pages allow you to see the direct, relevant snippets from citing papers without having to manually read each and every single one. I think that is quite valuable!
I know I've gone on a little tangent from the original discussion about scihub, and having free and open access to papers, but I did just want to throw that in because I think it's an important distinction. And as much as we all want that free and open world to exist, I think it's also interesting to think about how we can open up that information for people in the interim.
Best,
Ashish
It builds a graph of referenced papers and makes it easier to narrow down which one are important/foundational for further research
I don't think a glossary would help. What you need to find is a "review paper". These act as a primer to the field for new researchers. They're usually well written, with less jargon and have tons of references for you to dig into. That said, I don't have a good method for finding them.. I just stumble across them haphazardly..
The references and citations are tagged and filterable, making it easy to see which are the most cited, or review papers, etc.
True!
If you are finding many papers without hyperlinked references, it's probably just because they're published in journals whose templates don't support it. In my particular research field, most publication venues' templates starting supporting those links around 3-4 years ago, so my papers from, say, 2015 have no hyperlinks in references, while those from 2019 do. This didn't require any significant extra effort on my part, in fact in general it requires less because well-curated bibtex entries are easier to come by now than some years ago.
Can you show an example paper with links?
Part of this involves turning text data of authors into linked data that used to navigate between texts: https://author-disambiguator.toolforge.org/
Edit for direct link to Octopus: https://science-octopus.org