eLife is collaborating with participants from its inaugural Innovation Sprint earlier this year to develop SwipesForScience, a templating service that lets researchers quickly create mobile-friendly games that allow players to help with analysing large amounts of research data.
The prototype of SwipesForScience, developed at the eLife Innovation Sprint and originally called Appstract, used natural-language processing to mine free-text descriptions of scientific research and identify numerical data and text within them. These were presented to users as a game, tasking them with tapping only the values that contribute to a study's sample size. This data could then be fed back into the natural-language processing algorithms to further improve automatic sample-size detection in research papers.
The next phase of the project is being led by Postdoctoral Fellow Anisha Keshavan, from the University of Washington, and User Experience (UX) Designer Andreea Hrincu, in Sydney.
SwipesForScience will now help researchers to quickly and easily create their own games for crowdsourcing data analysis and drive their research forward. The games will support a variety of annotation tasks, including text-based annotations for meta-analyses, and image and sound-based annotations.
eLife has a mission to help scientists accelerate discovery by operating a platform for research communication that encourages and recognises responsible behaviours in science. Through the eLife Innovation Initiative, the non-profit actively supports the development of new tools that enhance the communication or interrogation of new research. As part of this initiative, the organisation has committed to developing a releasable version of SwipesForScience.
The software will be made available with open-licensed data and a user-friendly interface, allowing people to play with the main template implementation and/or build their own game based on one of various templates.
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