Dive Brief:
- RefME on Wednesday announced it had received $5 million in seed funding for its automated citation platform, which is striving to be the most accurate and comprehensive tool of its kind on the market.
- The ed tech tool is gaining quick footing in the academic world for its ability to create citations and bibliographies with a few clicks or a scan.
- Outside money and interest is flowing in because of the possibilities in RefME’s data collection — it tracks what writers are citing and could help schools better pick textbooks and future users narrow their own reading lists, Tech Crunch writes.
Dive Insight:
RefME is not the first of its kind but it is perhaps the most nuanced in the latest generation of automated citation creators. It boasts more than 7,000 academic format options for the citation and improves its own tool based on corrections multiple users make on the same citation. The broader appeal of the model, of course, is the data collection. RefME will be able to offer a window into the intellectual community, centralizing information about reading habits and creating new possibilities for search functions to specialize results.
The danger with this type of search specialization will be the narrowing of general readership. The more researchers read a certain paper, the more that paper will be recommended to others, reducing the chance someone else will find important work at the edges of the mainstream.