SABICHAO
Connecting scientific claims to their sources
SABICHAO is a research tool I’m developing to help researchers explore scientific papers through the claims they make and the sources they cite. It organizes PDFs into structured, searchable content while preserving sections, paragraphs, figures, tables, and source locations.
At its core are citances: the passages where authors refer to previous research. SABICHAO identifies these passages, matches their citation markers to bibliography entries, and produces reports for human review. The current prototype also connects to local Zotero collections and reconciles reference information with scholarly databases.
The longer-term goal is to use each citance as a starting point for discovering related literature, helping researchers examine how evidence supports, qualifies, or challenges a claim while keeping every connection traceable to its source.
What is a citance?
A citance is a sentence or short passage that refers to another publication. It preserves the context in which a source is cited: what the authors say about it and how they use it in their argument.
These fictional examples illustrate different uses:
- Reporting evidence: “Previous studies found that early environmental conditions influence later development [12,13].”
- Using a method: “We analyzed the interviews using the framework proposed by Smith et al. (2021).”
- Challenging a finding: “Unlike the results reported by Lee et al. (2020), we observed no difference between groups.”
In the first example, [12,13] is the citation marker; the full sentence is the citance. The corresponding bibliography entries identify the cited publications. SABICHAO connects these elements so researchers can follow a statement back to its sources.
