Bringing ideas to light
Our mission is to bring more eyes to bear on the science, challenge the current paradigms of our knowledge and understanding, and bring new ideas to light.
PSIref is an openly available online platform dedicated to the discovery, dissemination, and discussion of scholarly literature. The platform creates an online library by aggregating, indexing, and integrating the metadata of research and academic publications, affiliated datasets, subjects, keywords, journals, books, book series, and publishers and directly links these data to full-text data sources via DOI identifiers or custom hyperlinks.
PSIref aims to address and resolve many of the challenges that have long affected the processes of discovering, disseminating, and discussing scholarly literature. It stands out by offering much-needed transparency and continuity in the highly fragmented landscape of scholarly publishing.
An architecture designed for discovery provides for a broader readership.
PSIref’s platform architecture significantly enhances the visibility of journals and their articles within the scholarly literature during the discovery process. By providing a transparent and responsive user interface for accessing integrated metadata, PSIref presents 'scholarly content in context'.
PSIref addresses several critical challenges within the scholarly literature ecosystem. Its innovative approach to presenting 'scholarly content in context' significantly enhances transparency for end-users. By allowing them to readily assess the size and depth of its repository, PSIref offers a clear window into the vast world of academic knowledge. Furthermore, PSIref's architecture empowers end-users by providing visibility into each article's citation network, facilitating seamless exploration of related reading materials. This expedites their discovery and acquisition of information and knowledge, ultimately saving valuable time and resources. Additionally, PSIref enables users to efficiently browse each article's reference list, providing valuable insights into potential further readings, highly cited papers, and, notably, highlighting problematic or retracted publications as those citing these retracted cases here, here, here, or here - a pervasive issue in scholarly literature that PSIref has successfully addressed. This proactive approach helps users avoid costly errors and safeguards their research endeavors from potential pitfalls, reinforcing PSIref's role as a valuable asset to the scholarly community.
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
In contrast to other discovery services that often present search results as disjointed article entries, PSIref’s search results are directly linked to their 'in situ' representation within the published issue and journal on the platform. This layout substantially increases the probability of drawing attention toward other related articles within the same issue and throughout the respective journal.
PSIref provides an extraordinarily powerful means of discovery.
You can find and discover articles of interest through conventional 'keyword' search pathways, but more importantly, relevent or related articles are visible through various ancillary pathways facilitated by our integrated metadata approach. For instance, articles within PSIref become readily visible when they appear in another article's reference list, 'cited by' list, citation network, or are associated with affiliated subjects or keywords. Additionally, where applicable, articles with pertinent connected content such as retraction notices, expressions of concern, errata / corrigenda, or third-party comments / questions / concerns (e.g., PubPeer Comments) are also readily visible within these lists and search results, as well as at the granular level of an article’s record. This embodies what we mean by 'scholarly content in context' as it provides an extraordinarily powerful means of discovery. It empowers you to promptly assess the content's relative value to your query or interest, aggregate, collate, and, most importantly, access the article's full-text content directly on the publisher's hosting platform, eliminating the need for significant time and effort searching the corners of the internet looking for what you are after.
Whether you are an author or a reader, PSIref's passive functionality endows articles and research with an unprecedented level of visibility, enhancing their potential for discovery, dissemination, and discussion. In doing so, it contributes to both scientific advancement and the public good. Furthermore, it fosters awareness of new or existing scholarly content, ultimately broadening the readership and extending its reach beyond traditional means available to scholarly publications.
The PSIref library is a continuously updating platform working to bring scholarly literature as close to realtime as possible - downloading, integrating and indexing publicly available scholarly metadata. You may perhaps stumble upon the borders of our data repository - where the bare bones of the data infrastructure is clearly evident. This may be due to not having the data available (i.e. possibly it has not been released by the publisher) or may still be in our queue for synchronization, integration and indexing. We can assure you, we're workin' on it!