"The Business of Extracting Knowledge from Academic Publications"

From The Seeds of Science journal:

This article was originally posted on December 7th, 2021 on Markus’ website.

TL;DR: I worked on biomedical literature search, discovery and recommender web applications for many months and concluded that extracting, structuring or synthesizing "insights" from academic publications (papers) or building knowledge bases from a domain corpus of literature has negligible value in industry.

Close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web

Here’s the outline:

1. The Business of Extracting Knowledge from Academic Publications

   1. Psychoanalysis of a Troubled Industry

   2. My Quixotic Escapades in Building Literature Search and Discovery Tools

   3. Fundamental Issues with Structuring Academic Literature as a Business

      1. Just a Paper, an Idea, an Insight Does Not Get You Innovation

      2. Contextual, Tacit Knowledge is not Digital, not Encoded or just not Machine-Interpretable yet

      3. Experts have well defined, internalized maps of their field

      4. Scientific Publishing comes with Signaling, Status Games, Fraud and often Very Little Information

      5. Non-technical Life Science Labor Is Cheap

      6. The Literature is Implicitly Reified in Public Structured Knowledge Bases

      7. Advanced Interactives and Visualizations are Surprisingly Unsatisfying to Consume

      8. Unlike other Business Software, Domain Knowledge Bases of Research Companies are Maximally Idiosyncratic

      9. Divergent Tasks are Hard to Evaluate and Reason About

   4. Public Penance: My Mistakes, Biases and Self-Deceptions

   5. Onwards

Psychoanalysis of a Troubled Industry....

....MUCH MORE

Last week's visit to Seeds of Science was:

"The Economics of Time Travel "