Papercore

The number of scientific publications per year is steadily increasing. This makes it difficult to keep up with the latest developments in larger areas of science.

Papercore[1] is a public read-write database, which aims at helping scientists to cope with this development. Papercore collects summaries of scientific papers, in particular in physics, where this database is optimized to. Note that a summary is not just an abstract: A summary should contain the core information of a paper, including a little introduction, basic definitions, outline of methods and key results of a paper, such that a specialist in the field does not have to look into the paper anymore, basically. The rule of thumb is that a summary should be 1/10 of the length of the corresponding paper, the compression factor is automatically computed by Papercore for each summary.

Reading and writing summaries provides a strong benefit because:

• Reading summaries save you a lot of time, since you can obtain scientific information in a condensed way, which is very useful to get on overview over current and past developments or to enter a new field.

• Your profit from writing a summary because you are forced to understand the paper much deeper and you provide a service to the scientific community. If you are, say, a graduate student, you will learn scientific writing very well by writing summaries. Writing scientific summaries is part of the training process of graduate students in many research groups. Finally, if you are an author, you could even provide a summary of your own paper at Papercore to make your work better known.

Note that this idea is not new, e.g. the American Mathematical Society's Mathematical Reviews (created as a successor of the "Zentralblatt der Mathematik" by Otto Neugebauer who fled Germany in 1933) provide summaries of mathematical publications. But Mathematical Reviews are edited, have restricted access and the summaries are typically much shorter (only slightly longer than abstracts).

Papercore, in contrast, is organized according the Wiki principle, hence everybody who is registered can submit or edit summaries.

Technicaly, Papercore uses latex as basic file format, different to Wikipedia, but exports also to html and pdf. For a detailed instruction of how to use papercore, see the papercore help. For some background information on Papercore, take a look at the history of Papercore

Finally: Papercore allows also to host overview summaries, which are not based on single scientific papers, but which serve more like commented link lists to a subset of the summaries, e.g. from a certain sub field. Take a look at an example.

Papercore is created and supported by Prof. Dr. Alexander K. Hartmann and the Computational Physics Group of the University of Oldenburg (Germany). It is developed and hosted by the Institute of Science Networking of the University of Oldenburg (Germany).