SciNoon: exploratory search system for scientific groups
SciNoon is a system for collaborative exploration of scientific papers. SciNoon is an essential tool for a group of researchers to dive quickly into the new area of knowledge and to find answers on their questions, following up with tracking new research on the topic of interest with highly customizable alerts.
Features and advantages
SciNoon is an innovative system designed to optimize long-term teamwork with scientific papers. The papers could be added both from search systems and from digital libraries (like Google Scholar, arxiv.org, Semantic Scholar, PubMed) or could be uploaded directly as PDF files. The key feature of SciNoon is graphical research maps that all team members can add papers to.
SciNoon provides:
- Shared workspace for collaborative processing of found scientific papers.
- Zooming research map to control paper visualization details.
- Deduplication and cleansing of the uploaded metadata made possible by the internal database that allows discovering connections between papers or authors.
- Citation context classification into five classes depending on a citation role.
- Background: a cited paper contains general information about the research area;
- Use: a citing paper uses methods, data, and so on from the cited paper;
- Compare: a citing paper points out differences (or similarities) with the cited paper;
- Extend: a citing paper continues the research from the cited paper;
- Weak: a citing paper criticizes the cited one pointing to the authors’ mistakes.
- Possibility to find relevant papers without a keyword search using an integrated recommendation system.
- A customizable list of questions whose answers should be looked up in a paper. Based on the retrieved answers the paper is visualized differently on the research map.
- Possibility to group similar papers into clusters.
- Notifications for team member actions, as well as support for quick opinion exchange within the team and helping each other.
- Collected answers analysis via built-in spreadsheet view and an option to export data to a CSV file for more complex processing.
- Tracking new papers on a given research topic and updating previously gathered results.
Who is SciNoon target audience?
- R&D department researchers that need a fast solution to their scientific problem.
- Scientists who need a tool for collaborative teamwork.
- Scientific advisers and their students who are doing exploratory search on research projects.
SciNoon deployment stories
SciNoon is used in ISP RAS while doing research and when advising students.