A Collaborative Site That Allows You to See the Scientific Consensus on a Question with Just One Click

papermap.org Papermap

Get an overview of scientific literature findings on a wide range of questions.

27 comments

Five maps so far. Is someone doing this by hand, the hard way? I figured it was an AI someone programmed, but if it's an individual or small team, big respect. Very neat project.
- github links show 2x contributers. cool project
- They provide links to their github that explains their whole methodology. This is a scientific effort and is as transparent and well-documented as a project can be. They provide the code so you can understand the exact mechanics at play or just fork the project if you want to take the work in a different direction.
  It’s a great project and long overdue. I personally think scientific journals are incredibly outdated and haven’t been necessary for a couple of decades. Just put your work on a stable web site and cut out the parasites at the journals.
- I hope they are able to grow this without compromising the quality or vision, because I'm sure they'll have lots of people willing to get involved, but maybe not all for the most ethical reasons.
- AI would probably be pretty useful for this. You'd have to assume most of the "answers" are in the abstract, so you could just build one to scrape academic texts. Use an RAG so it doesn't hallucinate, maybe. Idk if that violates some T&C nonsense that doing it by hand doesn't though.
  
  This is a bad idea. It's extremely likely to hallucinate at one point or another no matter how many tools you equip it with, and humans will eventually miss some fully made up citation or completely misrepresented conclusion.

It's cool that shows all the papers and not just some abstract metric or yes or no answer.
it's still only five topics and you really just have to trust the devs that info is accurate and not biased.
- They provide direct quotes from the papers that support their scoring and also direct links to the full papers.
  It’s super easy to just check their conclusions. I followed up on several papers yes and no on the vax question. There was no skullduggery as every paper I looked at was represented fairly in the scoring.
  As in other scientific efforts, this is not just a ‘trust me, bro’ situation. They provide references.
  
  Not what I really meant. I was after that one has to trust them to actually provide a suitable and representative coverage on all the papers released on the subject.

Please add a section about nature! Global warming, deforestation, and other human effects on nature.
- You can suggest new maps. They ask for links to papers, so if this is a thing you are passionate about and have some recent papers, especially review papers. Reviews seem to get more points in their schemes.
  I love this project too and have a personal passion in neurobiology studies related to benefits of yoga. When I have a couple of hours, I will submit a map suggestion for that topic.

What does the circle size indicate?
- From the docs in GitHub: "The size of the dots corresponds to the number of reviewed papers for literature reviews (non-reviews have the smallest size)..."
- I wondered the same. It doesn't seem to correlate to P-Size, citations, or participants. Maybe a combined factor of each that is calculated? I'm really not sure.
- Couldn't quite work that out either. I initially thought it might have been to do with the number of citations but that didn't pan out
- I think it might be the number of papers used to answer the question. Not totally certain though

This is awesome, but things like how the paper score is calculated should probably be on the website itself, not some scrolling and a couple of clicks away on the GitHub page. Maybe a single link or pop up on the chart itself?

27 comments