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I am kinda excited by this. A way to find when a game-changing moment took place in science. And the idea around using PubMed data is also a good one.
(For those who don't know about arXiv - http://arxiv.org/- It is an open access collection of "739,631 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics." The publication method in these fields is quite different from that in health sciences - in health science researchers mostly publish in peer-reviewed journals, and only after publication that those articles go into the PubMed database http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/. In the fields included by arXiv, I was told by a friend that progress is made quickly and instead of the journal-publication method I was originally familiar with, many e-prints are submitted to arXiv so that they are available publicly almost immediately. Some important works in physics, math, cs, etc are published only in this manner. This mechanism actually works quite well in these fields. For engineering, on the other hand, people mostly publish in conference proceedings and not in journals...I learned this when I was involved in a multidisciplinary project. Interesting eh?)
"Culturomics' team pivots from Google Books to scientific preprints."
Via Theresa Liao
