Accelerating Scientific Discovery with Multi-Document Summarization of Impact-Ranked Papers

Abstract: The growing volume of scientific literature makes it challenging for scientists to move from a list of papers to a synthesized understanding of a topic. Because of the constant influx of new papers on a daily basis, even if a scientist identifies a promising set of papers, they still face the tedious task of individually reading through dozens of titles and abstracts to make sense of occasionally conflicting findings. To address this critical bottleneck in the research workflow, we introduce a summarization feature to BIP! Finder, a scholarly search engine that ranks literature based on distinct impact aspects like popularity and influence. Our approach enables users to generate two types of summaries from top-ranked search results: a concise summary for an instantaneous at-a-glance comprehension and a more comprehensive literature review-style summary for greater, better-organized comprehension. This ability dynamically leverages BIP! Finder's already existing impact-based ranking and filtering features to generate context-sensitive, synthesized narratives that can significantly accelerate literature discovery and comprehension.