Harnessing Scholarly Literature as Data to Curate, Explore, and Evaluate Scientific Research

Abstract:  There currently exist hundreds of millions of scientific publications, with more being created at an ever-increasing rate. This is leading to information overload: the scale and complexity of this body of knowledge is increasing well beyond the capacity of any individual to make sense of it all, overwhelming traditional, manual methods of curation and synthesis. At the same time, the availability of this literature and surrounding metadata in structured, digital form, along with the proliferation of computing power and techniques to take advantage of large-scale and complex data, represents an opportunity to develop new tools and techniques to help people make connections, synthesize, and pose new hypotheses. This dissertation consists of several contributions of data, methods, and tools aimed at addressing information overload in science. My central contribution to this space is Autoreview, a framework for building and evaluating systems to automatically select relevant publications for literature reviews, starting from small sets of seed papers. These automated methods have the potential to help researchers save time and effort when keeping up with relevant literature, as well as surfacing papers that more manual methods may miss. I show that this approach can work to recommend relevant literature, and can also be used to systematically compare different features used in the recommendations. I also present the design, implementation, and evaluation of several visualization tools. One of these is an animated network visualization showing the influence of a scholar over time. Another is SciSight, an interactive system for recommending new authors and research by finding similarities along different dimensions. Additionally, I discuss the current state of available scholarly data sets; my work curating, linking, and building upon these data sets; and methods I developed to scale graph clustering techniques to very large networks.