How do we make sense of the body of scientific literature that is growing explosively to the point where no individual could read all the relevant papers, and is contaminated with fraudulent and LLM-generated papers? I think that science is not currently equipped to deal with this, and we need to.

I think a critical part will be post-publication peer review. With such rapid growth and time pressure on scientists, pre-publication PR cannot maintain sufficient standards so we need a way to make the informal networked review (journal clubs, conference chats etc.) more transparent and shared.

We also need ways to summarise and make connections between many related papers. I know that many people are hoping that LLMs will step up into this role, but right now that seems very risky and I don't see that changing any time soon.

LLMs are too distracted by surface level presentation, and can be manipulated at scale by iterating over multiple presentations until the LLM summarises it in the way you want it to. In addition, they're known to have problematic biases, and it's unclear if this can be fixed.

I think we need to be experimenting with ways to distribute the work of summarising and making connections between papers, and aggregating that into a collective understanding. An individual can't read all the papers, but collectively we can and already are. We just need ways to integrate that.

In principle we could do this with a post-publication peer review system that allows reviewers to annotate with connections, e.g. in reviewing paper X you create a formal link saying that part of this paper is similar to paper Y, or uses the same technique, etc.

One issue is that these annotations might become corrupted or manipulated in the same way that papers, journals and peer review have been. How do we fix that? It's not ideal, but one option might be some form of trust network: I trust X, they trust Y and thereore I (to a lesser extent) trust Y.

This would mean our summary or evaluation of the literature would depend on our individual trust network. But, this isn't a bad thing in principle. Diversity of opinion is good: there shouldn't be one definitive reference summary because that's a single point of failure and target for manipulation.

All these ideas require experimentation, and both technology development and a cultural shift towards collectively taking responsibility for doing this work. I think we need to do it and would love to hear others' ideas about how to do it and how to convince everyone that we need to.

#science #metascience #academicchatter