In this blog post, which was co-written with Bianca Kramer (Utrecht University Library) and Ludo Waltman (CWTS, Leiden University), we discuss the value of openly available abstracts. This post was originally published at Medium.

It's a cliche to say that the volume of scientific literature produced is increasing at a rate beyond which researchers can keep up. With the rise of Machine learning techniques and more importantly the increasing availability of open meta-data and increased open full text , we are starting to see tools appear that try to leverage this to produce applications that can help take the load off researchers on what to read and to

Microsoft Academic (first relaunched in 2016) is one of the biggest index of academic content next to Google Scholar. It consists of two major parts Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), the open dataset source generated by Microsoft by their Bing crawlers and Microsoft Academic - the web search interface  created over MAG data.  Microsoft Academic - the web search interface  created using MAG.

One thing the COVID-19 crisis has put a spotlight on is how well our scientific publishing system works. Preprints that allow more speedy dissemination of scientific results but at the cost of quality have been in the spotlight . The impact of perverse incentives that leads researchers to delay release of data to publish in top journals is yet another problem that has become more salient.

Boolean query in 2D Search for Lens.org (sneak peak) In a fairly popular  2014 blog post entitled "Why Nested Boolean search statements may not work as well as they did", I set out the case for why for the majority of users, doing overly complicated nested boolean is unlikely to be of much additional value. Argument rested on two main arguments.

How is everybody? As I write this, we are in day 9 of our "circuit breaker" (which is very like a soft lockdown) here in Singapore. As an introvert and being pretty adept on the use of technology for communicating, I would have thought that this would be a dream for me. Don't get me wrong.

While I have been adjusting to the latest change in my personal life, the world has been grappling with the impact of COVID-19. Updated : 30th April 2020 Here are my list of interesting resources that caught my eye.

Back in Oct 2018 (I know because I searched my email), I was helping some third party test a browser extension that would provide links to free full text (somewhat akin to Unpaywall) and I came across this curious Dark Grey box with the words "PDF" at the side of a journal article.

With the rise of open access journals and in particularly the business model involving APCs (Article Processing Charges) where authors pay a fee upfront to make their papersopen access, we are now understandably worried about authors publishing in "potentially predatory journals", where publishers have the incentive to charge a fee and not do proper vetting before publishing the paper.

1. Dimensions (includng free) now includes Research Datasets 2. Google dataset search comes out of beta 3. Datacite adds citation display showing links between articles and datasets The release, storage, management,  and discovery of Research Datasets is an area that has been advancing in the last few years. Here are three new updates that caught my eye in the last few months.

Warning : This is a thinking out-loud post , where I try to elucidate my understanding of statistics and ways of showing evidence for causation.