The General Index provides words and phrases from millions of scientific research articles – a massive resource for researchers for free.
What there is to know:
-
On October 7, Public Resource, a nonprofit organization, released the General Index, a repository of 355 billion words and phrases related to scientific articles in which those words appear.
-
While it includes articles that are behind pay walls, the index is no more than five words per article, so it respects publishers’ copyright restrictions.
-
Creator Carl Malamud aims to enable researchers to conduct large-scale analyzes without being limited to open access articles or those to which they have access.
-
The index is considered by some to be a major development in text mining. It allows scientists to build more extensive databases on specialized topics in scientific literature.
-
A search engine was not created with the index, but Malamud hopes that if anyone designs one, they will make it accessible to everyone.
This is a summary of the article “Giant, Free Index to World’s Research Papers Released Online”, published by Nature on October 26th. The full article can be found at nature.com .
For more news, follow Medscape on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.
