Impactstory Announces Beta Release of “Get The Research” Search Engine

Impactstory, the company behind Unpaywall,  PaperBuzz, Impactstory Profiles, and Depsy have released a public beta of their new “Get the Research” search engine that we first posted about last July.

Impactstory partnered with the Internet Archive and British Library on on this project. Funding comes from a $850,000 grant from Arcadia.

This EARLY beta release is focused on biology and medical material primarily from PubMed. More material on other topics will be available in later releases. 

Learn more about the Get The Research project in our July 8, 2019 post.

Impactstory Co-Founder Jason Priem Tells infoDOCKET:

Our goal is quite different to a lot of the existing scholarly search applications because we’re focused quite tightly on helping “non-specialist” users access and understand the scholarly literature.  So, some of the query tools that academics might expect may be slower to appear in Get the Research or not appear at all.

A Few Fast Facts From the Get the Research FAQ

• All of the research on this site appears in academic research journals, and the vast majority of this content is peer reviewed.
• Get The Research flags each article with its “level of evidence” when we know it — is the article just a report about a single patient (a “case study”) or a more trustworthy analysis combining the results of many studies (a “meta-analysis”)? Click on the tags above the article titles to learn more. We rank articles with higher levels of evidence higher in the search results to make these easier to find. Reading the news studies about a paper (linked to from the “Learn More” page when we’ve found news articles) is a great way to find out what others think about the results.

Note: Since this is an early beta release we are looking forward to seeing more features/options. That said, here are a few things we spotted today. 

What We Noticed

• Some results include images and background articles from Wikipedia.
• There is an option to limit results to only those with open access articles (no paywall).
• We LOVE the option to be alerted to new results for a query by email. Look for the “subscribe to feed” link below the search interface
• An option to view results pages and entries in API format is available.
• Here’s what an item-level record looks like. Note clickable subjects/descriptors at the top.

Final Comments (For Now)

• We’re big fans/admirers of the Impactstory at infoDOCKET. Congrats to Heather, Jason, and the rest of the team.
• Exciting to have another new tool developed by members of the library and info science community.
• We look forward to sharing more info/updates going forward, stay tuned.

Direct to Get the Research (Beta)

Direct to Get the Research FAQ

See Also: Rick Anderson Interview with Jason Priem from Get The Research (via SK)

Filed under: Funding, Interviews, Journal Articles, Libraries, News, Open Access, Patrons and Users, Profiles