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Most people who have had to dive into the huge, wild seas of academic literature will relate with the feeling we often feel: a mixture of excitement combined with dread. You are reaching for a breakthrough, a new connection, a new piece of knowledge that has never before been found in the world while also fighting against time, and an overwhelming number of PDFs. The dream is to spend all your time thinking about it, analyzing it, and creating it. The problem is that so many researchers-from PhD students who are just starting out to lab directors with years of experience-are spending their time lost in the logistical state of trying to find, sort and sift through literature. However, what if a huge portion of that grunge work simply…disappeared? There has been an increasing amount of chatter, within the academic community, not about any one theory but, instead, about the development of a new tool that is transforming their everyday workflow to make them more productive. That name appears consistently: Wispaper. Not only are researchers using it, but they’re also discussing how it is changing their view of the literature. There are two dominant themes among this group of researchers: it saves tremendous amounts of time, and it can help locate relevant information in a very effective manner. Now let’s hear from a few of these researchers.
The Timesaver Phenomenon
Talking about time from the perspective of researchers doesn’t mean simply counting minutes and hours. It means looking at cognitive bandwidth (the total amount of cognitive energy we have available to do tedious tasks) and how that translates into how much cognitive energy we have available to do things like write papers and conduct experiments. For example, one postdoc in computational biology said, “I would block off almost an entire Friday afternoon for ‘literature maintenance.’ That was the administrative side of maintaining my brain and included things like downloading articles and renaming files when I was finished reading them and checking to see if there were new citations on my topic. It was work that was necessary but not very productive.” This idea permeates every aspect of the pre-whipping stage; the workflow is often a collection of multiple sources of content: a reference manager, for instance, is one sourc, your browser may have 50 open tabs, you may use multiple spreadsheets to track submissions, and you have a folder structure that makes sense only to you. There is a tremendous amount of overhead associated with it all.
Introducing wispaper: the praise of wispaper is for its seamless integration, rather than flashy AI. “It’s automating the boring stuff,” said an ecologist with marine research experience. “I set up my alerts and interests and wispaper does all the heavy lifting while I’m busy. It’s like I’m working with a devoted research assistant; they’re always there for me and they’re very organized and precise.” The automation provides tangible time savings because all of the hours previously spent manually going through table of contents alerts on 12 different journals are no longer needed. The wispaper system gives you an aggregated and more importantly prioritized version of that information based on YOUR profile. Time you’ve previously ‘found’ is now ‘created’; instead of consuming information passively and on a very broad level, you can now engage with it actively and on a much narrower focus.
Wispaper’s ability to save time in the alerts phase is only one of the ways that wispaper saves you time. The organization phase also benefits from wispaper’s time-saving ability. “The point in time that I realized that I was no longer worrying about file names or folders was my light-bulb moment,” said a professor of materials science. Wispaper can automatically retrieve, sort, and save documents by project or subject, so you don’t have to worry about cleaning up your digital work space. Researchers report having renewed mental peace by having a single, smart, one-stop shop for all of their articles. You won’t have to search through your entire email account, your Zotero account, and every dusty file you have in your downloads folder, in an effort to recall a partially remembered document; wispaper will have it, and by using tags, you can find your way back to it. This consolidation of information is an excellent time-saver because it reduces the friction at each and every minor step in the research process and is, therefore, probably the most valuable type of time-savings you can achieve.
The Relevance Revolution
The first major part in the researchers’ chorus is saving time; achieving accuracy in discovery is the second part, which makes a stronger harmony. Anyone who has done keyword searching has horror stories of returning thousands of results with only a few relevant entries (which is why a sociologist said it is a skill to be able to quickly skim abstracts). This is a defensive skill (you train yourself to reject noise), but often times you may also be rejecting a potentially significant signal because you don’t use the same words. Traditional search requires the researcher to guess what words to use, and is thus a major bottleneck.
Researchers who benefit from wispaper’s method of finding relevant research papers are thrilled that the wispaper software not only recognizes terms, but also understands their meanings. A researcher from the field of immunotherapy said, “My focus is a niche area of immunotherapy. The terms I use to search for papers have multiple meanings and are used in other fields like computer science and finance. Before wispaper I didn’t receive relevant papers because there were too many papers irrelevant to my work that I was searching for using keywords. Now there are exclusively relevant papers shown to me from previous searches conducted by wispaper and wispaper understands the context of my niche.” Researchers point to this effort to move away from simply matching words on papers as the tipping point in understanding the concept of context when searching for relevant research papers. Wispaper does not simply search for terms but rather creates a semantic map showing relationships between concepts instead of just searching by term.
Wispaper’s relevance engine excels at finding interdisciplinary connections and consequential “seed” papers. An example of this is a historian of science, who discovered a pivotal engineering paper from the 1970s that was the basis for the creation of early ecological models. She had never made this connection before because the two disciplines currently use completely different jargon for their respective concepts. According to this researcher, “Wispaper didn’t locate it because I asked for it. It found it because there was a logical connection between what I’m presently reading and the earlier paper.” One of the most profound aspects of Wispaper’s ability to transcend discipline-specific vocabulary barriers is its ability to create opportunities for innovation since many major advances occur at the interface of multiple disciplines.
In addition, researchers value the smart serendipity created by wispaper. Wispaper recommendations often include papers that are a little unrelated, serving as additional inspiration, and come from different but close areas of study compared to what are often just “similar articles” listed on other sites that would have many overlapping references. “It will help me locate the article I didn’t know I needed,” said a machine learning Ph.D. candidate. “Wispaper recently recommended an article on statistical methods that helped me with a data visualization problem I had struggled with for weeks, and there’s no way I would have ever uncovered that article otherwise.” This style of curated serendipity has made the process that researchers go through when trying to locate literature both more efficient and more creative, and it has taken the platform from being just a database to being used as a discovery partner.
Beyond the Basics: The Ripple Effects
Researchers don’t merely engage in a conversation about “saving time” or “finding good papers” with regards to the use of tools like wispaper; they are also discussing the other benefits of a tool or app like this through secondary (i.e., ripple effect) and ancillary (i.e., bonus) benefits. In the case of wispaper, one of the major themes among researchers has been better project management and collaboration. For example, one principal investigator in biochemistry stated, “My lab is now using wispaper for our shared projects. We can all put our relevant articles (those we found) into the same place, see what we are all reading on a continuous basis, and develop a complete bibliography together, in real time. Wispaper has made a huge difference in the way we run our weekly lab meetings and, ultimately, has helped create a dynamic, constantly moving knowledge base for the entire research group to use. Overall, wispaper has eliminated some of the duplication of effort among research personnel and has also helped to ensure that everyone is working on the same page.”
A further effect of wispaper is the level of detail and applicability in literature reviews and grant proposals. Wispaper allows researchers to start with a more defensible and comprehensive foundation when developing either a literature review or grant proposal. As one public health researcher remarked, “When I write a literature review or a grant background, I can feel confident that I haven’t overlooked a critical, more current paper in the haystack.” The tracking and alert features provide researchers with a more accurate representation than they could create by relying on their own memories or random manual search activities. All of this certainty is important in the high-stakes arena of academic printing and funding.
Nonetheless, The most impactful change could be the transformation of a researcher’s mindset through a constant source of stress such as “keeping up” is often attributed to feelings of anxiety. Researchers commonly denote this as FOMO (doing enough research) in terms of academia. Researchers find that when they use a dependable mechanism like wispaper for the “reconnaissance” work, they become less prone to being unfocused and more empowered in making their own decisions. “I have found that using wispaper has significantly decreased my level of academic anxiety,” said a researcher from early on in their research-journey in Psychology. “I know wispaper is monitoring all of the pre-print servers as well as journals for me, so when I close my laptop I can go without fearing that an unbelievable discovery has occurred while I was gone. I know that I can have this mental peace is priceless.” Because of this change from a reactive method of searching to a proactive/managed discovery method, researchers can have a greater ability for quality thought and to think deeper without distraction.
The Human in the Loop
Researchers are very aware of how powerful a tool wispaper can be; they don’t regard it as an oracular source of knowledge, but rather a powerful tool. The general consensus is that when wispaper is used in conjunction with human intelligence, that’s where it really provides the most value. “You still need to look through your own critical lens,” stated an experienced physicist, adding, “Wispaper gives you a great pool of articles to start from,; however, you still have to read the articles and assess the methodology and link them all together. Wispaper enhances your intelligence, it does not replace it.” As researchers work through wispaper, they use it as a means of dealing with the massive amount of articles and for doing the first level of filtering of articles, allowing them to conserve cognitive energy for performing synthesis, critique, and developing new ideas.
Others explored researchers’ needs for developing the platform (e.g., refining their interests, indicating whether or not papers are relevant, and expanding project libraries). As one user expressed: “The more I work with this tool, the more intelligent it becomes for me…. It is a partnership. As I provide my opinions about the research, it provides me with improved recommendations.” Thus, this continual learning process and collaborative relationship between researchers and the tool contribute greatly toward the success of the research tool by transforming it from merely a static software application to an interactive element of the research system.
There is no doubt about the fact that wispaper has proven to be more than just another app by the way researchers, academic Twitter users and attendees of conferences have talked about it. Wispaper is a disruptive technology for revision and is helping to optimize their entire scholarly workflow. It directly addresses two of the main limitations of researchers’ finite resources, both time and attention. It does this by automating uncreative, intelligently filtering through uncreative data to present relevant information to users, thus changing both the way they discover papers and the way they view the process of conducting scholarly research. The original goal was not to be an expert library user or search engine operator; rather, it was to move forward with new and innovative ways to create new knowledge. Therefore, if tools such as wispaper can help remove barriers to progress, researchers can save time as well as speed up the advancement of knowledge. That is a story worth telling (and living) as many of those researchers are doing already.
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