Mapping scientific papers
The other idea I woke up and had an idea and thought to myself, that would be cool. This is not something that I know how to do at all professionally, and I’m just posting the idea hoping one of the big scholarly search engines like Web of Science or Google Scholar implements the idea.
So, the idea is this:
Most scientists like myself spend lots of time searching the science literature. The best search engine out there is Web of Science, which has a steep subscription fee to even search, although there are others that are free (Google Scholar, for example). Just because you can see a list of papers whose abstracts/titles/keywords contain a certain search string, doesn't mean, of course, that you have subscription rights to actually read the full-text version of the paper (that depends on whether your institution has a subscription for the relevant journal). Anyway, one of the annoying tasks scientists have to do is do a geographical search. If I was in Star Trek, I would just say something like "show me a list of all ecology papers that were conducted in Maryland". You can't really do that, so you search some text string like "ecology AND Maryland", which kinda works, although it finds all articles that talk about something in Maryland (a perhaps unavoidable problem, given how scientific papers don't have good geographical metadata). So, one annoying thing about having to do this kind of text seach is that of course there are lots of geographical place names that are *in* Maryland: Montgomery County, Bethesda, Rock Creek Park, etc. So, I just wonder why one of these search engines don't write a little code to use Google Maps so that the place names in the map were searched in Google Scholar (or whatever) so that you could click on the place name and find a list of all the papers that cite that place name. Most place names would have no citations, but I guarantee you that by clicking around scientists would find interesting studies near their study area that they didn't know existed.
So, the idea is this:
Most scientists like myself spend lots of time searching the science literature. The best search engine out there is Web of Science, which has a steep subscription fee to even search, although there are others that are free (Google Scholar, for example). Just because you can see a list of papers whose abstracts/titles/keywords contain a certain search string, doesn't mean, of course, that you have subscription rights to actually read the full-text version of the paper (that depends on whether your institution has a subscription for the relevant journal). Anyway, one of the annoying tasks scientists have to do is do a geographical search. If I was in Star Trek, I would just say something like "show me a list of all ecology papers that were conducted in Maryland". You can't really do that, so you search some text string like "ecology AND Maryland", which kinda works, although it finds all articles that talk about something in Maryland (a perhaps unavoidable problem, given how scientific papers don't have good geographical metadata). So, one annoying thing about having to do this kind of text seach is that of course there are lots of geographical place names that are *in* Maryland: Montgomery County, Bethesda, Rock Creek Park, etc. So, I just wonder why one of these search engines don't write a little code to use Google Maps so that the place names in the map were searched in Google Scholar (or whatever) so that you could click on the place name and find a list of all the papers that cite that place name. Most place names would have no citations, but I guarantee you that by clicking around scientists would find interesting studies near their study area that they didn't know existed.
