As researchers, you’re expected to create new knowledge, but this demands more than expertise; it requires you to stay updated on the latest, most relevant research in your field. While discovering the right literature is a herculean task in itself, reading and absorbing the concepts in research papers is a whole other ball game. Not only do you need to know where to find the right research and have full access to paywalled content, you need to be a subject-matter expert with high levels of proficiently in English to quickly read and understand often complex research papers.
R Discovery is on a mission to simplify research discovery and boost research reading. The latest additions to its audio capabilities allow R Discovery to now offer busy researchers the choice of listening to research abstracts or full-text articles and even listening to research in your own language. Let’s delve into this game-changing feature suite, carefully designed to make your research journey a little less daunting.
Research Reading: Challenges for Academics
Keeping up with research is critical but it is a time- and effort-intensive task that can feel overwhelming and impact your productivity. Most researchers have to tackle the following challenges:
Shortage of Time
Researchers juggle multiple responsibilities at the same time, all of which are essential to progress. Amid all of this, they also need to read research. An Elsevier report indicates that while literature search takes a lot of time but only 50% of shortlisted articles are useful.1 With so much time being seen as wasted, researchers often deprioritize the research discovery and reading process.
Language Barriers
Research papers have varied writing styles, and they can be difficult to read especially if you’re not familiar with the language. A Nature article highlighted that non-native English speakers often take twice as long to read an English paper than native English speakers, which significantly increases the time taken for research reading.2
Complexity of research papers
Researchers need to know established and new research methodology, potential limitations, and analysis practices in order to incorporate this in their own work. Yet, research papers are often technical and difficult to read. Here, reading research paper abstracts or summaries are essential to be able to quickly evaluate the relevance of articles for your own projects.
Understanding these real-life researcher challenges allowed R Discovery to offer unique solutions, including personalization in reading recommendations, fact-based answers powered by generative AI, reading in your own language, and now a full range of audio capabilities that allow you to listen to research on the go.
Beyond Text: Experience R Discovery’s New Audio Features
R Discovery’s expanded audio capabilities are designed to help researchers always stay updated on the latest research, quickly evaluate research papers with summaries, and boost overall productivity. Let’s look at how you can use each of these features to elevate your research journey.
Audio Summaries
With this new feature, R Discovery users can upload any full-text research paper and generate instant audio summaries. This allows researchers to quickly listen to a summary and delve into sections of the paper they want to understand better. Users can also skip papers or save them to read in more detail later, making it perfect for busy researchers allowing them to keep up with research while travelling or completing daily tasks. With audio summaries, researchers can cover and consume more papers than ever before, which is a major advantage when working on your literature review or research project. By simplifying the research and delivering it via audio, R Discovery helps you improve comprehension and complete your reading list faster, saving you time that you can invest in other research tasks.
Audio for Full-text Research Papers
Along with audio summarization, R Discovery also allows users to generate audio for any uploaded full-text papers. This one-of-a-kind feature helps researchers improve their productivity and redefine the way they consume research and by listening to full-text articles verbatim on the go. This is especially useful when you don’t have a physical copy of the article or where reading becomes a challenge, for instance while travelling or doing other manual tasks. Within a month of its launch, the usage of this feature almost doubled, highlighting the value this adds to researchers. R Discovery empowers researchers with the choice to listen to audio summaries in the interest of time, get audio for full-text articles that are relevant, or simultaneously listen and read the paper to enhance comprehension.
Multilingual Audio for Research Papers
A survey of 900+ scientists published in PLOS showed that compared to native English speakers, those with moderate English proficiency take 47% longer and those with low English proficiency take 91% more time to read English language papers3. With R Discovery’s multilingual audio feature, users can overcome these language barriers in research. Researchers with English as a second language can just upload a research paper, choose a language, and generate audio versions in their preferred language for both full text articles and paper summaries.
Researchers can now listen to research papers in their own language as well as read in more than 30+ languages on R Discovery, which simplifies access and speeds up comprehension for non-native English speakers. For instance, a scholar from Japan can now translate and listen or read any English language paper in Japanese; this eliminates the time spent referring to dictionaries or using translation tools to glean complex themes from research published in English. This time can then be productively used to read more articles, make progress on your projects, and contribute to your field of research.
Take the Next Step with R Discovery
R Discovery is committed to helping researchers save time, energy, and money by harnessing cutting-edge technology with its growing repository of over 120 million research articles. We take care of the most crucial aspects to simplify and optimize your research discovery and reading journey.
With R Discovery, you can:
- Get personalized reading recommendations with daily alerts on top papers.
- Access the largest repository of over 40 million open access journal articles.
- Listen to scholarly articles on the go or read research in their own language.
- Use your institutional credentials to read full-text papers via R Discovery.
- Get science-backed answers with Ask R Discovery, powered by generative AI.
- Collaborate with peers or access recommendations from researcher community.
- Enjoy multiple personalized reading feeds for each research project.
- Bookmark relevant papers and organize topics based on priority.
- Auto-sync the R Discovery library to reference managers like Zotero and Mendeley.
R Discovery is the best, most comprehensive solution for finding and consuming research today, which our growing community of over 2.7 million users will attest to. Try R Discovery’s newest audio features with our one-week free trial and take your research reading to the next level. Click here to get started with R Discovery now. We’d also love to hear your thoughts, so if you have any queries, feedback, or suggestions for new features to improve your experience on R Discovery, please do write to us at discovery@researcher.life.
References:
- Trust in Research. Research Survey by Elsevier and Sense About Science, June 2019.
- Lenharo, M. The true cost of science’s language barrier for non-native English speakers. Nature, July 2023. Available online at https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02320-2
- Amano, T. et al. The manifold costs of being a non-native English speaker in science. PLOS Biology, July 2023. Available online at https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002184&fbclid=IwAR3mW-zno2VhApPiA71SVZpeAus9B7MIjuyG2yBBLmsBu8uFXeX4APA5TLQ
