Speaker 1: Academic papers, the sort that are published in peer-reviewed journals, are horrible to read. We've got to stop pretending that this is the best way to get research across to each other. So check out this. This is like one of my papers from years ago and it is horrible. It is a nightmare of really dense language, really small text and just lots and lots of information that makes it almost impenetrable to anyone that's even a little bit interested in what's in this paper. It's got tables, it's got figures, it's got just like so much going on in a short amount of space that it can be just completely overwhelming if you're new to reading the peer-reviewed literature. So I was so happy when I came across this and I think you will be too because this is a tool that people can use to make this much more digestible and I'm talking about Semantic Reader. This is the Semantic Reader open research platform and this is not open to the public as far as I can tell at the moment but it's something that you should be keeping an eye on because this isn't a tool that's just like here's a tool, good luck, enjoy. It's like how do you want to interact with peer-reviewed papers? That's PDFs, that's legacy documents that you can extract more information from and I'm excited by what this could do for research. Ultimately, it is a collaborative effort between all these people that provide two tools, PaperMaj, something like that, and PaperCraft and by combining these two things we've now got a really powerful set of open source tools that we can use to look at peer-reviewed papers more effectively. So here we are, we've got PaperMaj, I don't know why that's that, PaperMaj, it's a weird name, PaperCraft and here is the code that they're based on. So by combining the powers of these two tools we can get around the challenge of accessing peer-reviewed papers which is discovery, efficiency, comprehension, synthesis and accessibility and the first one I want to show you that is built on the back of these two tools and it's a demo on their website is Skim or Sci-Im but I see what they did there, Skim, Sci-Im, you get it. This is for intelligently skimming scientific papers so once you put a paper in to this tool it produces this little tiny markers where you have the ability to skim, you know that this is a method, you know that this is a result, you know that this is a goal, this is a goal, this is a method, it makes it so easy just to skim the paper. This is something that every single academic does when they first get a peer-reviewed paper. You read the abstract, you go yeah I want to read more into this but you don't read it all, you skim it. This makes it so much easier and it's just so great. So here we've got another goal, another method and you've got all of these kind of like different settings down here. You can highlight certain things, you can enable skimming, turn it off, you can look for goals, methods, results. You've also got like you know all of the lovely settings to make it more readable but I really like this because it is something that every academic sort of like learns over time is how to skim a paper. Now it's done it for you, you know where the methods are, you know where a potential result is and you don't need to read the whole paper which is the point of producing a tool that allows you to do something like this. I absolutely love it and it's only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the sorts of tools people are producing. Check these ones out. The academic literature can be so confusing for new researchers and it can be really hard to find all of the important papers for your field. So that's where I want to talk about the sponsor of this video and that's Litmaps. Litmaps are an incredible tool. I've been using them for years and I really love what they're doing in the research discovery space. If you don't know where you need to get started they have this seed maps where you click on here, you put in a simple seed map like I have here and it produces all of the different research around it. I love it. It's great for finding out about a particular field very very quickly and you only need to start with one paper. That's incredibly powerful and you produce an awesome map of all the most relevant literature in such a short period of time. One of the most powerful tools they have is Discover. This is where you put in a number of academic papers and it will search for you saving you hours of time. It's very easy to use. You go in, click new search, put it in. The algorithm will find you the top connected papers. It will also find you co-authorship and the AI tool will give you the ability to semantically search all of the articles with similar content. So powerful saving hours of research time. All of the research that you're interested in is connected on a map and one thing I love about this is you can sort by momentum. Momentum gives you the ability to see which papers are being cited the fastest. Giving you the ability to look for trailblazers and new papers that are gaining the most momentum in your field. A really powerful tool that I've not seen anywhere else and it is all in Litmaps. You should go check it out because it is an important tool that I think every researcher should be considering using because it just saves you so much time. Another tool that was built on the back of the open source code was Papios. Whatever it doesn't matter. This is what it is. So we've got academic research papers with talk videos. So we augment the paper with someone talking about their work. It's like having the talk and the presentation in one package. I love it. So you can see here we've got all of these little kind of talks on the side which is near the section where they're talking about it. This is where they're talking about it. It's in green. This is what they're talking about. It's in blue. It's a really nice way to sort of like get some information without having to go through all of the horrible dense text. Let's take a look at it. I want to click here. Research consumption has been

Speaker 2: traditionally limited to the reading of academic papers. A static, dense and formally written

Speaker 1: format. There we are. We get the actual paper. We get it augmented with the conference presentation or just the presentation they upload alongside this. And it's kind of like combining two awesome powers. I definitely agree on this sort of like the more colloquial way we talk about our research in conferences, in presentations is actually far more accessible to so many more people. And this is bringing the power of that to papers. I love it. And then we got people building tools like this one where you can ask questions about any paper. So here you can see what are the key results of this paper. It gives you the key results. It gives you the support and evidence. So this is actually sort of like an alternative to ask paper, chat with PDF, all of those other tools that I've talked about. You can just produce your own with this open source code, which is really cool. So yeah, you can see here we've got the where they get in the support and evidence from. And let's ask it another question. So I've asked it, what are the limitations? Let's look to see what comes up. So here it's highlighted the responses to that question. And this is a really nice way to navigate peer reviewed papers. I love it. And there's more for you. There's this site read where you've got a peer reviewed paper and in the margins, it gives you different citations that allow you to deeper your understanding of a certain area. The one thing I like about this is it's not necessarily related to the citations in the actual paper like these numbers here. It just tells you look, this is what you could also go read. So I think this is a really good way of exploring the literature. And yeah, it can be a really powerful tool if used in combination with a few others that we've talked about. So I'm very excited about the potential of these sorts of tools in researchers hands. The last one I want to talk about is Scholify. And Scholify here is just essentially giving you a glossary of key terms that is actually in the paper in the order in which they appear because academic papers, if you're not from a certain field, are really difficult to read. There's acronyms. There's very field specific information that you need to understand. But here, it makes it all completely transparent. So you get the glossary of key terms, glossary of symbols. And let's go down to the paper. Let's have a look here. For example, this makes it really easy. If I click on that, oh, it gives you everything that's in the equation and what it stands for. This used to freak me out. I used to hate getting papers that had equations in it because I was like, oh, it's just all these stuff that I have to remember what it is. Not anymore. It's there for me. I think this is the future of reading papers. It's more dynamic. It's more interactive. And I love it. If you like this video, remember to go check out this one where I talk about AI enhanced academic writing and how you can use it step by step to half your writing time. The tools are incredible. I think you'll love them. Check them out. So there we have it. There's all of the tools that are currently being developed and the most exciting thing is they're all on open sourced libraries. So let me know in the comments which ones you think are going to be most exciting and are you going to create your own? Let me know in the comments. I'd love to hear about them. And also remember there are more ways you can engage with me. The first way is to sign up to my newsletter. Head over to andrewstapeson.com.au forward slash newsletter. The link is in the description. When you sign up, you'll get five emails over about two weeks. Everything from the tools I've used, the podcast I've been on, how to write the perfect abstract and more. It's exclusive content available for free. So why wouldn't you sign up? Go check it out now. But also you should check out academiainsider.com. That's my project where I've got e-books, I've got courses, I've got resource packs, I've got blogs, I've got forums and everything is over there to make sure that academia works for you. Alright then, I'll see you in the next video. Transcribed by https://otter.ai