Try a live sample of the application

Overview

Non-science writing is often expressed with a less complex and more engaging writing style. This makes accessible to a broad audience. In contrast, the content of scientific writing is often more complex. This is due to the tendency of scientists to use jargon-heavy language. This can make it inaccessible to many individuals.

This dashboard application allows the user to search for a scientific author. It first performs a web search to gather this author's published works. It then shows the readability score for each published works returned from the web scrape as well as an overall score for that individual. In addition, the application returns the most common and complex words used, sentiment, and a comparison to other text sources with known complexity. Read more about the application here.

More accessible science writing allows knowledge to be more readily transferred into public awareness, as well as between scientists of different fields. Objectively describing the complexity of different writing styles allows us to prescribe how to shift academic science writing into a more accessible niche, where science can better compete with pseudo-science and blogs.

If you're interested in contributing or reviewing the license for use of this application, refer to our documentation to learn more.

Running the application using Docker

git clone https://github.com/russelljjarvis/ScienceAccess.git
cd ScienceAccess

Build the container

docker build -t wcomplexity .

Run the container

Scraping is memory and CPU intensive. Default docker resources aren't suitable for running the application.

docker run --shm-size=3gb --cpus=2.0 --memory=1g --memory-swap=1g --rm wcomplexity

This last command will print two hyperlinks to the terminal. Click on the hyperlink that does not contain the substring local host. This will take you to the application in a browser window.

Running the application from the terminal

git clone https://github.com/russelljjarvis/ScienceAccess.git
cd ScienceAccess

which python3

place output from above command in

sudo [output] setup.py install

streamlit run app.py

License ScienceAccess is released under the CC BY-NC 2.0. By using ScienceAccess, you are agreeing to its usage terms.