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Collaborators on the project in- are most interested in—references Semantic Scholar. Allen Institute clude CiteSeerX, a product of the and citations, methods as a limiter, for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), Colleges of Information Science and graphs and tables—without 2157 North Northlake Way, Suite and Technology at Pennsylvania requiring a great deal of reading. 110, Seattle, WA 98103; State University [4]. CiteSeerX, pre- https://www.semanticscholar.org; With a growing need for re- ceded by CiteSeer, attempts to in- free. searchers and institutions to show dex full-text portable document impact, highly cited authors are format files (PDFs) in computer emphasized with influence scores, and information science using highly influential citations [5], total completely autonomous citation citations, a citations-per-year indexing (ACI). graph, and a citation velocity score. INTRODUCTION Authors with fewer than 50 cita- SEARCH RESULTS Eagerly awaited by researchers for tions are merely noted as “<50” years, concrete examples of artifi- Features of Semantic Scholar are in citations. Given sufficient citations, cial intelligence–enabled search keeping with the mission to save author maps indicate those most engines are beginning to emerge. the user time. By limiting results, influenced by an author and those Founded by the nonprofit Allen Semantic Scholar renews a scien- with the greatest influence on an Institute for Artificial Intelligence tist’s joy of discovery once again. author. The reference list brings (AI2), Semantic Scholar began as a Searches that return tens of thou- deeper meaning to citations by search engine for computer science, sands of results in Google Scholar showing where and how often a geoscience, and neuroscience in and thousands in PubMed return a reference is cited in the paper 2015. In response to researchers’ few hundred in Semantic Scholar, through a display of the semantic inability to keep pace with reading all directly relevant. Semantic context or contexts. Semantic all of the publications in their dis- Scholar removes the long tail of Scholar attempts to combine con- ciplines, the purpose of the project search results, allowing one to ventional citation metrics and alt- is automated learning from text in quickly get up to speed on one’s metrics with the “cited by” order to overcome information disciplines, while limiting the dis- function seen elsewhere in Web of overload. traction caused by less relevant Science and Google Scholar, as well research. Semantic Scholar also as links to tweets about citations. This project is just one by AI2 saves time by its drive to provide designed to fulfill the organiza- full-text and mobile-enabled de- SCOPE tion’s mission of “[artificial intelli- sign. It truly is a search engine de- gence] for the common good” [1]. Given the origins of the search en- signed by researchers for Semantic Scholar had ten million gine, neuroscience still predomi- researchers. articles prior to branching into bi- nates in the biomedical literature omedical literature in 2017 [2, 3]. It that Semantic Scholar indexes. The is reviewed here as an artificial in- CITATION ANALYTICS nature of searches may change as telligence–based search engine now The citation analytics features more citations are added. poised to play a large role in health graphically represent citation ve- disciplines. Semantic Scholar is no- locity and author influence scores INTEROPERABILITY table among artificial intelligence that help researchers pre-assess search for the velocity with which Semantic Scholar does not offer an quality, in much the same way that it is being developed and the application programming interface pre-assessed evidence levels aid strength and knowledge of the de- (API), preventing interoperability clinicians. Displays quickly visual- velopment team. with other health care or biblio- ize those elements that researchers
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metric systems. Users can copy and SIMILAR TOOLS ture impact, and at the time of this paste citations in Bibtex, Endnote, Semantic Scholar aims to combat writing, it is not yet available to the Modern Language Association the information overload and lack public [8]. Another artificial intelli- (MLA), American Psychological of quality assessment that many gence–enabled search engine with Association (APA), and Chicago researchers experience with Google a business focus, AlphaSense, has Manual of Style styles, but citations Scholar’s keyword search. To ac- been available by paid subscription cannot be exported. Users can cre- complish this, developers are cur- since 2010 [9]. ate reading lists if they sign in—via rently relying on preexisting Facebook, Twitter, or Google—but indexing in PubMed and IEEE, CONCLUSION those lists, also, cannot be exported. along with annotations provided Despite limitations, Semantic Authentication should be with the by medical subject experts. Articles Scholar achieves its aim of visually same account each time; that is, a without full-text links instead link representing the important ele- sign-in with Facebook will not link to a digital object identifier (DOI), ments of a paper (key people, data to a sign-in with Twitter. Users PubMed abstracts, or IEEE. cannot create alerts to notify them analysis, and graphical representa- of new search results. Like Google Scholar, Semantic tion of citations) without requiring Scholar combs the web for citations a great deal of reading. As an in- via an undefined algorithm, which troductory database on computer SEARCH REFINEMENT favors precision and full-text access science or neuroscience or one Favoring simplicity of interface, over recall. Unlike Google Scholar, meant to rapidly display impact to Semantic Scholar offers only a few it does not search behind paywalls. diverse stakeholders, it has value. options for refining and sorting Thus, despite the developers’ stat- Transitioning to biomedical litera- search results. It sorts only by rele- ed emphasis on quality, Sematic ture will take longer and require vance and publication date. While Scholar’s inability to search li- greater oversight by subject ex- it does allow truncation, it does not censed resources favors time, con- perts. While it works to overcome support Boolean or phrase search- venience, and access. Hence barriers imposed by publisher ing. Some limiters found here are researchers searching Semantic paywalls, Semantic Scholar’s great- not found in other databases—such Scholar in its current form cannot est value may be its ability to visu- as Data Set Used, Cell Type, and consider it a complete search of the alize open access research. Brain Region—which reflects the background literature in their dis- original audience targeted by the ciplines. REFERENCES database. PubMed now incorporates 1. Etzioni O. AI for the common good. Other limiters provide few op- many of the visualization features MIT Technol Rev [Internet]. 23 May tions. For example, Publication that Semantic Scholar explores in 2016 [cited 27 Jun 2017. Types limits currently only to jour-
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4. College of Information Sciences and 6. Malone KL. Semantic Scholar. Techno- 8. Meta [Internet]. Meta [cited 21 Nov Technology, Pennsylvania State Uni- philes Newscast 132 [Internet]. 30 Nov 2017].
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jmla.mlanet.org 106 (1) January 2018 Journal of the Medical Library Association