Crowdsourcing citation suggestions without needing to ask the crowd. The document introduces ForeCite, a service that provides citation recommendations for academic papers by analyzing the paper's text and comparing it to a database of citation contexts from other papers. It describes how ForeCite was developed to address the difficult and time-consuming process of finding and including citations when writing academic works. The service aims to improve paper quality, save author time, and enable new discovery and connections between works.

1. Crowdsourcing citation suggestions,
without needing to ask the crowd
Brian Bishop, Co-founder
@mochasteak

2. Brian Bishop
Business / Product stuff
Formerly VP of Platform
Development at
Springer, MBA,
14-year scientific
publishing veteran
Pawel Kowalski
Tech stuff
Tech Principal at iterativ
GmbH, full-stack dev,
MSc in Computer
Science, the whole deal
Our Team
02

3. Timeline*
03
Prototype goes live
November 2014
Today
January 2015
Company registered
August 2014
*timeline not to scale

4. We asked 1,044 authors
“What is the most
difficult or frustrating
part of writing a
paper?”

5. and this is what they said…
05

6. reading between the tags:
06

7. How painful is this problem?
07
836
Authors
surveyed
“How long did it take you to gather all the
references / find sources for your paper?”
25%
“More than
a week”
35%
“More than
a month”

8. That’s a lot of
time spent not
doing research

9. The average scientific paper has 35 citations
09

10. This is the citation
context
Each of those citations is embedded in a sentence
“Both experimental and
atomistic simulation results
show that when the
dimensions of the structures
become small then the ‘size
effect’ has significant role in
the mechanical properties
(Ruud et al. 1994).”
10

11. Now go the other way
Paper A
Paper B
Paper C
11
We can extract out all the citing contexts from all
the papers, and group them according to the
document being cited.

12. A database of contexts
A clinical implementation was described first for total mesorectal excision (TME) in the
treatment of rectal cancer [4, 5]. | The circumferential rectal margin (CRM) was
assessed according to the method of Quirke et al. [13], and a margin of < 1 mm was
considered CRM-positive. | Complete mesocolic excision (CME) with central vascular
ligation (CVL), according to the sound principles of total mesorectal excision (TME) [6,
7] for rectal cancer | A standardized routine pathology examination was performed
using the protocol of Quirke et al. [36]. | The surgical specimens were handled
according to standard clinical practice as advocated by Quirke et al. [20] and were
pathologically examined in accordance with the Tumor Node Metastasis staging
system. | For rectal cancer, the specimen was processed using the slicing technique
as described by Quirke et al. 33 | Pathologists were trained to examine the
specimens according to the protocol of Quirke et al. regarding the circumferential
resection margin (CRM), lymph nodes, and dissection plane.12 | Quirke showed a
linear correlation between the development of a local recurrence and an inadequate
resection with positive circumferential margins [14, 22]. | The pathologists were
trained to identify Circumferential Resection Margin (CRM), positive nodes, and lateral
spread of tumor according to the protocol of Quirke et al. [14]. | CRM was measured
according to the guidelines of Quirke et al.[37]. | Since 2002, all pathology
examinations for rectal cancer have been performed according to the guidelines of
Quirke et al. [15]. | Total mesorectal excision (TME) removes the primary tumor with
its surrounding mesorectum as an intact package, preventing residual tumor cells in
the mesorectum from developing into local recurrence.1,2 | Incomplete resection of
the lateral tumor margins is now considered the most important cause of local
recurrence [15–17]. | In a study by Quirke et al. [15], 83% of the patients with a
positive CRM had local tumor
12
Document X What everyone said about Document X

13. Example keywords
0 5 10 15 20 25
ana standardized routine pathology examination
tumor node metastasis staging system
preventing residual tumor cells
identify circumferential resection margin
complete mesocolic excision
central vascular ligation
total mesorectal excision
entire regional mesocolon
embryologic tissue planes
circumferential resection margin
radical oncologic resection
lateral tumor margins
standard clinical practice
positive circumferential margins
circumferential rectal margin
local tumor recurrence
pathology examinations
primary tumor
inadequate resection
clinical implementation
13

14. Where are we today?
230,000
fulltext articles
indexed
3.6 million
articles with a citation
8 million
citing contexts
14

15. Sources
…and you! (If you’re a publisher)
15

16. Now for the
really fun part

17. Our Service
PROCESSING
ForeCite breaks their text down
into sentences (not a trivial
task) and compares each
sentence against our database
17
UPLOAD
An author has written (or is
writing) their paper. They
upload it to ForeCite for
analysis
RECOMMENDATIONS
Finally, we provide a number of
different recommendation options
(with scoring) along with the
citing context for users to
compare against their text
ALGORITHM
There are many smart ways in
which texts can be compared. So
far we have only scratched the
surface. Hey, it’s early days.

18. Example Recommendations
Suggested
citations
Sentence with
suggested citations
What others wrote
when they cited the
suggested article,
inline for
comparison
purposes

19. What people said about Article X
One of the features
of ForeCite is that
you can look up an
individual article and
see all of the citing
contexts that we
have for this article

20. Benefits
20
Improves
quality
Saves
time
Enables
discovery

21. +44 777.173.4093
fore-cite.com
@fore_cite
brian@fore-cite.comContact Us
fore-cite.com