Blog: Powerful New Ways to Electronically Mine Published Research May Lead to New Scientific Breakthroughs

Powerful New Ways to Electronically Mine Published Research May Lead to New Scientific Breakthroughs
University of Chicago (02/10/11) William Harms

University of Chicago researchers are exploring how metaknowledge can be used to better understand science's social context and the biases that can affect research findings. "The computational production and consumption of metaknowledge will allow researchers and policymakers to leverage more scientific knowledge--explicit, implicit, contextual--in their efforts to advance science," say Chicago researchers James Evans and Jacob Foster. Metaknowledge researchers are using natural language processing technologies, such as machine reading, information extraction, and automatic summarization, to find previously hidden meaning in data. For example, Google researchers used computational content analysis to uncover the emergence of influenza epidemics by tracking relevant Google searches, a process that was faster than methods used by public health officials. Metaknowledge also has led to the possibility of implicit assumptions that could form the foundation of scientific conclusions, known as ghost theories, even if scientists are unaware of them. Scientific ideas can become entrenched when studies continue to produce conclusions that have been previously established by well-known scholars, a trend that can be uncovered by using metaknowledge, according to the researchers.

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