Finding research articles or other documents continues to be a needle in the haystack problem - with an ever-growing haystack. The proliferation of content means it has become increasingly difficult to find what you need. Search systems, such as Google Scholar or OpenAlex, support finding a handful of documents well, but what if the information you need is over multiple documents? Finding and making good use of a collection of documents relevant to your needs is now critical in all areas of research.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of the ways we create Nature Navigator topics, with the development status detailed. If you don’t have success with the live Nature Navigator Creator, reach out to the team who would be delighted to work with you to create a topic using an alternative method. This will help us refine those methods and prioritize their integration into Nature Navigator Creator.
| Topics | Description | Contacts |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-existing query | You have a search query from another platform, which can be adapted to be used in Nature Navigator | Contact the team who will convert the query on your behalf |
| Regular search in OpenAlex | Create a search query in OpenAlex and export result sets up to 100k DOI and use them as input in Nature Navigator | Contact the team who will import on your behalf |
| AI generated topics | Nature Navigator has over 30k predefined topics available for creation. | Search for a pre-defined topic and make a request for creation |
| Seed articles | An existing article, wikipedia page or other text is used to find semantically similar content | Contact the team to use your list of seed articles for topic creation on your behalf. |
| Seed text | Use a text decriptiopn, e.g. a wikipedia page or other text, to find similar content | Contact the team to use your seeding text for topic creation on your behalf |
| Chat conversation | Describe your topic with a chat interface | GenerativeAI outputs can be used to explore how best to define your topic. If you'd like to try this, speak with us and we can give you prompting guidance or just go ahead and try using ChatGPT or other LLMs and send us your input! |
All of the above techniques will become part of Nature Navigator Creator soon. By sharing your needs with us we will know better which ones to release first and can develop them to meet your needs.
Using OpenAlex to create a Nature Navigator topic
OpenAlex is a simple but powerful academic search engine. Navigate to OpenAlex to start your search:
You can add additional filters after completing your initial search:
And then download up to 100k articles as a CSV:
The export takes some time, but once completed download is quick. The files can be quite large so best to share via a cloud drive. Your customer success manager can create a Google Drive for sharing exports and will create the topic on your behalf.
This OpenAlex service is very recent and is the only service we are aware of that can export 100k articles. We’ll shortly adapt our Nature Navigator Creator UI to accept OpenAlex exports so you can use this creation method yourself.
Using LLM and chat agents to support topic creation
Nature Navigator already uses large language models extensively for topic creation. We’re working on a number of new ways to use LLMs in Nature Navigator. A simple benefit we’ve found is using it help explore synonyms in a more conversational style. Here’s an example prompt that you could use to help create a Nature Navigator topic:
