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A Computer Program Has Ranked the Most Influential Brain Scientists of the Modern Era (sciencemag.org) 39

Posted by BeauHD from the citation-analysis dept.
sciencehabit writes from a report via Science Magazine: A computer program has parsed the content of 2.5 million neuroscience articles, mapped all of the citations between them, and calculated a score of each author's influence on the rest to determine the most influential brain scientists of the modern era. The program, called Semantic Scholar, is an online tool built at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, Washington. It hopes to expand to all of the biomedical literature next year, over 20 million papers. The program sees much more than the typical academic search engine, says the project leader. "We are using machine learning, natural language processing, and [machine] vision to begin to delve into the semantics."
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A Computer Program Has Ranked the Most Influential Brain Scientists of the Modern Era More

A Computer Program Has Ranked the Most Influential Brain Scientists of the Modern Era

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  • I read that quote at the end as: "we are using all the latest buzzwords!"

    • Exactly. But he meant to say "deep learning" instead of "machine learning". No really, its not just a Python script that counts up the number of citations! It is AI, dammit!
      • Every AI system written in Python can ultimately be designated as "just a Python script", so your comment has at best zero informational value. Then again, when someone says "just a Python script", most people presumably don't picture semantic NLP etc., so you may just be plain wrong.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MrKaos ( 858439 )
        You're being bigoted 110010001000, you should never judge an AI by the size of it's codebase. I don't judge you by the size of yours.
        • Good for him; 110010001000 can be replaced by a very short shell script, grepping the submission for "space" and "AI" and then inserting a random diatribe.

  • PageRank? (Score:3)

    by NotInHere ( 3654617 ) on Saturday November 12, 2016 @05:11AM (#53270461)

    Isn't this literally what pagerank has been invented for?

    This sounds more like some advertisement for some AI corporation than something actually relevant.

    • Not entirely, perhaps. PageRank basically merely analyzes the graph of references and assumes that humans have done the grunt work and that the reference graph already reflects human judgment expressed in the form of linking to some pages and not to others. With smaller corpora, this might not be sufficient. Plus, judging citations may not be as easy as simply counting hyperlinks. What if you wanted to measure the impact of ideas and these ideas were rephrased in the referencing material? Plus, how would yo
    • No because MACHINE LEARNING, didn't you hear?? Give us some money.

  • Ramachandran (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Saturday November 12, 2016 @05:14AM (#53270475)
    He's not on the list, but I've always been a fan Vilanur Ramachandran. This is a long but nice lecture on how we appreciate art (and other things): https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • Wow (Score:2)

    by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
    computers are so smart... we must all believe the computer! How about - algorithm sorts scientists according to what the programmer thought was most relevant.
  • Who'd of thunk it... then again it was judged by a computer.

  • If Ben Carson isn't number one on the list, then this is just liberal media propaganda.

  • The headline is more general than the article. The title just says "the most influential brain scientists of the modern era". "Influential" depends on the context and the target audience.

    The article does clarify in its first line "influential neuroscience research" and thus the measure of number of citations is probably reasonable within that specific community.

    But the article headline seems to imply a more general use of "influential" that implied to me "in the general population", Thus before reading the

  • We would hope that more influentual authors ans works are better ones. Whether that hope is well founded is another thing.

  • Great. Another way for faculty committees to grade their peers and decide who gets tenure.

  • Really, metrics are not a beginner's game and are tricky even for vastly experiences experts. This one here is worthless or worse. It just shows which research was easiest to do meaningless incremental "research" on, nothing else. So in fact, whoever came out on top here has a good chance of having done flashy, but actually sub-standard research.

    "A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers." (Plato) applies in spades.

  • WTF is a "brain scientist"? Is that anything like a rocket surgeon?

  • How do I activate others?
  • Why just rank neurosciences? Is it really a closed-circuit field that can be weighted on its own without looking at other publications?

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