Peer Review for Generating Structured Data

Every scientific article contains a connected structure of concepts and claims. References to related concepts and claims made by other articles extends these connections, making a rich network that connects all the work in a field — and at the limit, all human knowledge.

Review of scientific articles by experts usually provides an opinion on the quality of a given article. Such an expert will have their own mental model of this connected network — the connections to related claims, best practices, and consequences of the work. We consider an additional form of expert review, perhaps earlier in the process, that does not seek to provide an opinion of quality, but instead produces this connected structure of concepts and claims as a data set that can be easily shared. The set of all connected data across all the articles in a field would capture the detail, common understandings, and perhaps opportunity within a field. Such a data set could serve as the foundation for new types of applications, analyses, and research.