A Scizzle’ing Web App that Helps With Your Research Papers

In any research, literature search and review forms an integral part, it is time consuming too. And the fact that there are over 1.5  million research papers published each year worldwide* which on an average is close to 3 new papers a minute, makes it really hard for researchers to keep track of all the papers as and when it is published. But it is also essential for them to keep themselves updated with relevant papers as they are published as they may be crucial to their ongoing research.

It is said that researchers spend about 140 hours a year on searching and reviewing literature, which roughly translates into 6 days a year that can be effectively put to use doing research than going through piles of electronic or printed pages. Many researchers and post grads who have been doing that or seen their peers do that have realized it and some of them have come up with solutions to address this issue. One such solution is Scizzle.

Scizzle, founded by Gaia Valisilver-Shamis earlier this year is a start-up aiming to make researchers’ life easier by helping them keep abreast of the latest happenings in their area of interest by providing them with aggregated articles and literature, and it has done a good job of it too. Scizzle, as its tag line says “Don’t Search. Research” allows researchers to create custom feeds by entering the keywords relevant to their research interests and their feeds will be populated with articles accordingly. Articles of interest can be archived into the “Scizzling Pot” and they can also be exported in .ris format. So, once the literature search part is taken care of, they can concentrate on their research.

Scizzle was launched in mid-2013 and is currently in beta stage. It is maintained by a team of four along with a host of writers who contribute regularly to Scizzle blog. According to Ms. Shamis, Scizzle’s mission is to help researchers and scientists save valuable time so they can spend it on research and not wasting it on searching and feeling guilty that they don’t keep up with the literature. “Scizzle for science is like Pandora for music” says Ms. Shamis. Scizzle is currently a web application with a mobile app in the works.

Some of the other players working on the same mission of making literature search easier include PubChase – A life science and medical literature recommendation engine by ZappyLab and Sciencescape.

*According to 2009 statistics