StudentResearcher
Receives Answer

StudentResearcher
Derives his/her
Own Conclusions
from Hot Links

Inside HotLinks 2D Full-text SearchMATCH Discovery System

HotLinks extracts thousands of key terms from the input material, including textbook chapters, course materials,research papers, journal articles, monograph excerpts, etc., and performs a search on each of the thousands of key terms. The thousands of results for each of the thousands of search terms are then fed into the HotLinks matching system, which finds the best matches with the input material and sorts those matches by relevance to the source materials. The diagram below illustrates the process.

It is quite common for scientists to have accumulated hundreds to thousands of journal articles that are relevant to their current research. However, it is not so common for researchers to be able to recall the content of their relevant articles so well that they don’t need to reference them repeatedly. An effective digital system to facilitate fast and easy navigation between a thousand articles is needed.

Digital technologies should be able to assist researchers with recalling the correct article as well as remembering which article to recall. When a researcher wishes to recall some particular information, it can be difficult to remember which article contains the information. Also, locating, loading and checking file after file can be very tedious.

A good first step might be to distill the five to 50+ pages of each relevant article into one or a few short excerpts. Abstracts can be a bit long, but more important, they often inadequately represent the reasons the articles are deemed relevant.

HotLinks SearchMATCH discovery is not only excellent at finding relevant articles, but it also allows the user to highlight the specific excerpts that represent the article’s relevancy to the user. HotLinks stores copies of the highlights in a list along with a link from each highlight to its source article. Together, these features should be necessary and sufficient to allow researchers to quickly and easily navigate between relevant articles, but for one thing: the overwhelming number of relevant articles that researchers typically find to be relevant.

In order for researchers to be able to quickly and easily navigate between relevant articles when the number of relevant articles exceeds one or two hundred, the researchers’ memories must be enhanced. The Mind Palace system built into HotLinks does just that. It relies upon the human brain’s highly developed ability to navigate visually. For more information on this phenomenon of the human brain, click here or lookup Simonides ‘method of loci,’ which is often called ‘Mind Palace’

HotLinks Mind Palace allows the user to easily build and name ‘rooms,’ organize the rooms into a ‘palace floorplan’ and fill the rooms with highlights. Navigating this floorplan can be very quick, especially if the floorplan makes sense to the user. Due to the brain’s excellent spatial memory, each time it is used, the Mind Palace becomes more and more familiar. Eventually, articles can be recalled in 10 seconds or less, saving a lot of time and perhaps more important, eliminating loss of train-of-thought, which is especially important while collaborating with colleagues.