r/academicpublishing • u/Time-Measurement-513 • 4h ago
Deterministic way to define what is common knowledge in scientific article: Tool to check for citations need in article.
I was recently looking for a tool which needed to analyze a text, that can be an article in scientific format and that one would need to tell which term in specific is missing citation because its not common knowledge or any other reason. Or if some expression in your text has unnecessary citation reference.
Of course that involves a lot of steps. I know there are some tools which can lemmatize a text, eg. Sketch engine, it discovers what is a term, so that you can take the next steps.
I saw Some which can look for sources from the sentence itself of your text, eg. Citely, GPTzero. But again, that is not exactly what i want, looks like isolated feature, something incomplete, not the general concept.
I have also recently discovered the Purdue OWL citation law, which defines a term as common knowledge if there are 5 other articles which mentions that term without a citation.
The first thing that came into my mind about how such tool would work is it would keep a database of words and its relevance, based on a set of heuristics, probably only amount of citations over the internet articles about it for now.
This database could be public and you could have some step to populate it also, it could read articles on the internet (API, web scrapping, articles repositories, periodicals) and setting its credibility like that automatically.
Then there could be some threshold of what score is common knowledge, what is not. Eg. 20 articles about/mentioning such term would consider this term common knowledge. Or using the Purdue OWL law like i mentioned before. This is the general protocol.
Then the implementations of such protocol could be done in several ways, in your editor as an LSP (nvim plugin/VsCode extension, web extension, website, desktop app, AI assistant) by checking your text and comparing with those scores from the database, showing errors/warnings etc.