NSF2026: EAGER: Involving the Public in the Discovery of Undiscovered Public Knowledge

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

Scientific literature is ever growing, and this creates the opportunity to piece together undiscovered public knowledge by making connections across publicly available science information. An idea targeted by one of NSF’s Idea Machine ideas is the “Globalization of Science Results with AI”, where artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to sift through large volumes of science literature and potentially synthesize new scientific results. This project seeks to examine whether non-researchers can make connections across a large body of scientific literature and synthesize new results and ideas that are relevant to current research questions. This method is analogous to using AI to do the same task and is timely given that current AI technology does not allow for the completion of this type of task. By assessing the ability of non-researchers to aid researchers in performing academic literature reviews, this project will make advances in two additional NSF Idea Machine topics, “Creating Sustainable Education Pathways” and “Reinventing Scientific Talent”. The project is to be conducted in two phases. The first is an exploratory phase that will seek to understand the differences in ability between groups of non-researchers and researchers to complete literature review tasks, determine the ability of non-researchers to find information among different scientific topics, assess training methods, and assess the effects of creating cohorts of individuals that show promise in a specific area of science. The project will explore the viability of creating a paid workforce of trained workers that can conduct quality scientific literature searches, potentially across disciplines. The generation of new scientific knowledge is expected to be generated at the intersections of scientific disciplines. In the second phase, deployment, a field study will be used to determine how well the findings in the first phase work when employed in real-world use case literature searches. This project will provide a novel means for the public to engage with scientific research, specifically targeting high school and undergraduate students who are historically underrepresented in STEM. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.