Mission of Research Analysis

By Scott Needham

Posted in How to use Research Analysis and FAQ Scientific Knowledge Management

The overarching mission of Research Analysis is to accelerate the rate of scientific discovery through the provision of knowledge management and discovery tools to scientists.

Our knowledge management platform:

• captures scientific claims from the literature in a formalised structure.
• rapid and powerful search tools to find existing scientific claims
• analysis tools that assess:
  • the level of support for a claim in the literature
  • conflicting claims
  • knowledge gaps in the literature
• help scientists identify unique and promising hypotheses to test experimentally
• is intuitive and easy to use

We have found that past efforts to build similar tools tend to focus on the computational aspects of knowledge management: How can we get all of the knowledge out of the literature and scientists heads and into a database that can then be mined by the geeks and AIs? This tends to imply that if only the computers could get all of the information, then they would do a better job than the humans. We disagree.

We don’t believe in a Robot Scientist future! We believe that humans continue to have a far superior ability to make the intuitive leaps that lead to scientific discovery. But on the other hand we believe that the computers beat us hands down on being able to manage vast stores of information and to be able to process this information rapidly using logical analysis. We believe that by providing powerful and intuitive knowledge management tools to leading scientists that they will be able to make higher quality intuitive leaps and at a faster rate. The goal of RA is not to extra the knowledge and feed it to the robots, but instead to feed it back to the scientists using powerful tools that make it easy and fast to interrogate.

Some examples of benefits that can come from using Research Analysis include:

• We have all had the experience of remembering a finding from a paper, but not the specific details. Even once you find the paper, were is the specific support in the paper. RA puts these key findings at your fingertips.
• Even the greatest scientists of all time regularly thought they had a new discovery, but later (sometimes much later) found that some obscure scientist had already come up with it 10 years prior. RA allows you to rapidly identify if there is existing support for a scientific claim.
• On the other hand, you want to know whether a scientific claim is valid. Use RA to find all of the papers that support and challenge the claim to assess its merit.
• Use the analysis tools to visualise matrices of scientific claims to identify conflicts, trends or gaps in the literature. A powerful source of new research topics.

Research Analysis is constantly looking for opportunities to improve and extend our platform to support scientists in their work. The platform was originally designed to meet the challenges of our collaborators in their research and we feel that the best way to improve the platform is through helping scientists solve hard problems. We would appreciate feedback, suggestions and the opportunity to work with scientists to help solve their problems.