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Computer Science > Machine Learning
Title: kan 2.0: kolmogorov-arnold networks meet science.
Abstract: A major challenge of AI + Science lies in their inherent incompatibility: today's AI is primarily based on connectionism, while science depends on symbolism. To bridge the two worlds, we propose a framework to seamlessly synergize Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) and science. The framework highlights KANs' usage for three aspects of scientific discovery: identifying relevant features, revealing modular structures, and discovering symbolic formulas. The synergy is bidirectional: science to KAN (incorporating scientific knowledge into KANs), and KAN to science (extracting scientific insights from KANs). We highlight major new functionalities in the pykan package: (1) MultKAN: KANs with multiplication nodes. (2) kanpiler: a KAN compiler that compiles symbolic formulas into KANs. (3) tree converter: convert KANs (or any neural networks) to tree graphs. Based on these tools, we demonstrate KANs' capability to discover various types of physical laws, including conserved quantities, Lagrangians, symmetries, and constitutive laws.
Comments: | 27 pages, 14 figures |
Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computational Physics (physics.comp-ph); Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability (physics.data-an) |
Cite as: | [cs.LG] |
(or [cs.LG] for this version) | |
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A new ‘AI scientist’ can write science papers without any human input. Here’s why that’s a problem
Dean, School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University, RMIT University
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Karin Verspoor receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Medical Research Future Fund, the National Health and Medical Research Council, and Elsevier BV. She is affiliated with BioGrid Australia and is a co-founder of the Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare.
RMIT University provides funding as a strategic partner of The Conversation AU.
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Scientific discovery is one of the most sophisticated human activities. First, scientists must understand the existing knowledge and identify a significant gap. Next, they must formulate a research question and design and conduct an experiment in pursuit of an answer. Then, they must analyse and interpret the results of the experiment, which may raise yet another research question.
Can a process this complex be automated? Last week, Sakana AI Labs announced the creation of an “AI scientist” – an artificial intelligence system they claim can make scientific discoveries in the area of machine learning in a fully automated way.
Using generative large language models (LLMs) like those behind ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, the system can brainstorm, select a promising idea, code new algorithms, plot results, and write a paper summarising the experiment and its findings, complete with references. Sakana claims the AI tool can undertake the complete lifecycle of a scientific experiment at a cost of just US$15 per paper – less than the cost of a scientist’s lunch.
These are some big claims. Do they stack up? And even if they do, would an army of AI scientists churning out research papers with inhuman speed really be good news for science?
How a computer can ‘do science’
A lot of science is done in the open, and almost all scientific knowledge has been written down somewhere (or we wouldn’t have a way to “know” it). Millions of scientific papers are freely available online in repositories such as arXiv and PubMed .
LLMs trained with this data capture the language of science and its patterns. It is therefore perhaps not at all surprising that a generative LLM can produce something that looks like a good scientific paper – it has ingested many examples that it can copy.
What is less clear is whether an AI system can produce an interesting scientific paper. Crucially, good science requires novelty.
But is it interesting?
Scientists don’t want to be told about things that are already known. Rather, they want to learn new things, especially new things that are significantly different from what is already known. This requires judgement about the scope and value of a contribution.
The Sakana system tries to address interestingness in two ways. First, it “scores” new paper ideas for similarity to existing research (indexed in the Semantic Scholar repository). Anything too similar is discarded.
Second, Sakana’s system introduces a “peer review” step – using another LLM to judge the quality and novelty of the generated paper. Here again, there are plenty of examples of peer review online on sites such as openreview.net that can guide how to critique a paper. LLMs have ingested these, too.
AI may be a poor judge of AI output
Feedback is mixed on Sakana AI’s output. Some have described it as producing “ endless scientific slop ”.
Even the system’s own review of its outputs judges the papers weak at best. This is likely to improve as the technology evolves, but the question of whether automated scientific papers are valuable remains.
The ability of LLMs to judge the quality of research is also an open question. My own work (soon to be published in Research Synthesis Methods ) shows LLMs are not great at judging the risk of bias in medical research studies, though this too may improve over time.
Sakana’s system automates discoveries in computational research, which is much easier than in other types of science that require physical experiments. Sakana’s experiments are done with code, which is also structured text that LLMs can be trained to generate.
AI tools to support scientists, not replace them
AI researchers have been developing systems to support science for decades. Given the huge volumes of published research, even finding publications relevant to a specific scientific question can be challenging.
Specialised search tools make use of AI to help scientists find and synthesise existing work. These include the above-mentioned Semantic Scholar, but also newer systems such as Elicit , Research Rabbit , scite and Consensus .
Text mining tools such as PubTator dig deeper into papers to identify key points of focus, such as specific genetic mutations and diseases, and their established relationships. This is especially useful for curating and organising scientific information.
Machine learning has also been used to support the synthesis and analysis of medical evidence, in tools such as Robot Reviewer . Summaries that compare and contrast claims in papers from Scholarcy help to perform literature reviews.
All these tools aim to help scientists do their jobs more effectively, not to replace them.
AI research may exacerbate existing problems
While Sakana AI states it doesn’t see the role of human scientists diminishing, the company’s vision of “a fully AI-driven scientific ecosystem” would have major implications for science.
One concern is that, if AI-generated papers flood the scientific literature, future AI systems may be trained on AI output and undergo model collapse . This means they may become increasingly ineffectual at innovating.
However, the implications for science go well beyond impacts on AI science systems themselves.
There are already bad actors in science, including “paper mills” churning out fake papers . This problem will only get worse when a scientific paper can be produced with US$15 and a vague initial prompt.
The need to check for errors in a mountain of automatically generated research could rapidly overwhelm the capacity of actual scientists. The peer review system is arguably already broken , and dumping more research of questionable quality into the system won’t fix it.
Science is fundamentally based on trust. Scientists emphasise the integrity of the scientific process so we can be confident our understanding of the world (and now, the world’s machines) is valid and improving.
A scientific ecosystem where AI systems are key players raises fundamental questions about the meaning and value of this process, and what level of trust we should have in AI scientists. Is this the kind of scientific ecosystem we want?
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Technical reports first appeared in the early part of the 20th century. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) published a series of professional papers beginning in 1902, and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) issued its first report in 1915. But, the format gained importance during World War II, emerged in the postwar era, and remains, to this day, a major tool for reporting progress in science and technology, as well as in education, business, and social sciences research. The names given to series of these publications vary, but are often such generic terms as "technical reports," "working papers," "research memoranda," "internal notes," "occasional papers," "discussion papers" or "gray (or grey) literature." In the physical and natural sciences, "technical report" seems to be the preferred designation. For reports dealing with business, education, and the social sciences, on the other hand, the terms "working paper," "occasional paper," and "memorandum" are often the designations of choice. Other, more specific types of technical reports include "preprints" and "reprints." Preprints generally are versions of papers issued by researchers before their final papers are published by commercial publishers. Preprints allow researchers to communicate their findings quickly, but usually have not been peer reviewed. Reprints are typically released to heighten awareness of the research being conducted in a particular field or at a single institution. The term, "technical report" encompasses all of these designations.
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The Federal Government issues many different types of technical reports. An overview of some of these can be found in a May 2001 GAO report, " Information Management: Dissemination of Technical Reports ." Government issued or sponsored reports contain an additional characteristic - they may be subject to distribution restrictions linked to their classification status. Although references to classified reports may be found in technical reports literature, the security status or limited distribution of reports may make them unavailable to the general public and to the Library as well, as the Library holds only titles in the public domain. Those interested in locating such materials can consult the U.S. Department of Justice's Freedom of Information Act site for guidance in obtaining these reports.
To enable them to be identified and located, technical reports are assigned report codes by agencies or organizations involved in their production or distribution. These codes may be referred to as "accession numbers," "agency report series numbers," "contract numbers," "grant numbers" or by other names, and include dates and individual report numbers. Typically, reports are assigned multiple codes and these codes help to identify the sponsoring agency, the organization performing the research or the organization disseminating the report. Most technical reports held by the Library of Congress are not cataloged, and, for these reports, one or more report codes is required for Library staff to check the collections for a report or to locate and retrieve it. For more information about the current Standard Technical Report Number format (STRN) see ANSI/NISO Z39.23- 1997 (S2015) Standard Technical Reports Number Format and Creation .
Standards are specifications which define products, methods, processes or practices, and are known to have existed as early as 7000 B.C., when cylindrical stones were used as units of weight in Egypt. According to Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-119 , as revised in 2016, the term "standard" or "technical standard" refers to:
- common and repeated use of rules, conditions, guidelines or characteristics for products or related processes and production methods, and related management systems practices;
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Technical standards are not "professional standards of personal conduct; or institutional codes of ethics." (p. 15).
Standards are typically generated by governments or by professional associations and organizations interested in or affected by the subject matter of particular standards. For example, U.S. government standards mandated by the Fair Packaging & Labeling Act (FPLA) have standardized the labeling required for packaging in which consumer commodities is sold. Standards set the basis for determining consistent and acceptable minimum levels of reliability and safety, and are adhered to either voluntarily or as mandated by law. For a more complete overview, see the NIST report " The ABC's of Standards Activities " by Maureen A. Breitenberg (2009).
The Library of Congress standards collection includes military and other federal standards, industry standards, and a few older international standards from Russia, China, and South Africa. Material from the collection is available in various formats, including digital, print, and microform materials. The majority of the Library's standards collection held in the Science Section's Technical Reports and Standards Collection. The collection remains largely uncatalogued, and as a result, most items from this collection are not discoverable in the Library's online catalog. Inquires on Library holdings can be sent to the Science Section using the Science and Technical Reports Ask-a-Librarian form . Some standards, however, are housed in the Library's general collections and discoverable by searching the online catalog -- the ASTM standards are one example. Other standards are in custody of appropriate specialized research centers, such as the Law Library , which maintains OSHA standards and some building codes.
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August 21, 2024
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A new 'AI scientist' can write science papers without any human input—here's why that's a problem
by Karin Verspoor, The Conversation
Scientific discovery is one of the most sophisticated human activities. First, scientists must understand the existing knowledge and identify a significant gap. Next, they must formulate a research question and design and conduct an experiment in pursuit of an answer. Then, they must analyze and interpret the results of the experiment, which may raise yet another research question.
Can a process this complex be automated? Last week, Sakana AI Labs announced the creation of an "AI scientist"—an artificial intelligence system they claim can make scientific discoveries in the area of machine learning in a fully automated way.
Using generative large language models (LLMs) like those behind ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, the system can brainstorm, select a promising idea, code new algorithms, plot results, and write a paper summarizing the experiment and its findings, complete with references. Sakana claims the AI tool can undertake the complete lifecycle of a scientific experiment at a cost of just US$15 per paper—less than the cost of a scientist's lunch.
These are some big claims. Do they stack up? And even if they do, would an army of AI scientists churning out research papers with inhuman speed really be good news for science ?
How a computer can 'do science'
A lot of science is done in the open, and almost all scientific knowledge has been written down somewhere (or we wouldn't have a way to "know" it). Millions of scientific papers are freely available online in repositories such as arXiv and PubMed .
LLMs trained with this data capture the language of science and its patterns. It is therefore perhaps not at all surprising that a generative LLM can produce something that looks like a good scientific paper—it has ingested many examples that it can copy.
What is less clear is whether an AI system can produce an interesting scientific paper. Crucially, good science requires novelty.
But is it interesting?
Scientists don't want to be told about things that are already known. Rather, they want to learn new things, especially new things that are significantly different from what is already known. This requires judgment about the scope and value of a contribution.
The Sakana system tries to address interestingness in two ways. First, it "scores" new paper ideas for similarity to existing research (indexed in the Semantic Scholar repository). Anything too similar is discarded.
Second, Sakana's system introduces a "peer review" step—using another LLM to judge the quality and novelty of the generated paper. Here again, there are plenty of examples of peer review online on sites such as openreview.net that can guide how to critique a paper. LLMs have ingested these, too.
AI may be a poor judge of AI output
Feedback is mixed on Sakana AI's output. Some have described it as producing " endless scientific slop ."
Even the system's own review of its outputs judges the papers weak at best. This is likely to improve as the technology evolves, but the question of whether automated scientific papers are valuable remains.
The ability of LLMs to judge the quality of research is also an open question. My own work (soon to be published in Research Synthesis Methods ) shows LLMs are not great at judging the risk of bias in medical research studies, though this too may improve over time.
Sakana's system automates discoveries in computational research, which is much easier than in other types of science that require physical experiments. Sakana's experiments are done with code, which is also structured text that LLMs can be trained to generate.
AI tools to support scientists, not replace them
AI researchers have been developing systems to support science for decades. Given the huge volumes of published research, even finding publications relevant to a specific scientific question can be challenging.
Specialized search tools make use of AI to help scientists find and synthesize existing work. These include the above-mentioned Semantic Scholar, but also newer systems such as Elicit , Research Rabbit , scite and Consensus .
Text mining tools such as PubTator dig deeper into papers to identify key points of focus, such as specific genetic mutations and diseases, and their established relationships. This is especially useful for curating and organizing scientific information.
Machine learning has also been used to support the synthesis and analysis of medical evidence, in tools such as Robot Reviewer . Summaries that compare and contrast claims in papers from Scholarcy help to perform literature reviews.
All these tools aim to help scientists do their jobs more effectively, not to replace them.
AI research may exacerbate existing problems
While Sakana AI states it doesn't see the role of human scientists diminishing, the company's vision of "a fully AI-driven scientific ecosystem" would have major implications for science.
One concern is that, if AI-generated papers flood the scientific literature, future AI systems may be trained on AI output and undergo model collapse . This means they may become increasingly ineffectual at innovating.
However, the implications for science go well beyond impacts on AI science systems themselves.
There are already bad actors in science, including "paper mills" churning out fake papers . This problem will only get worse when a scientific paper can be produced with US$15 and a vague initial prompt.
The need to check for errors in a mountain of automatically generated research could rapidly overwhelm the capacity of actual scientists. The peer review system is arguably already broken, and dumping more research of questionable quality into the system won't fix it.
Science is fundamentally based on trust. Scientists emphasize the integrity of the scientific process so we can be confident our understanding of the world (and now, the world's machines) is valid and improving.
A scientific ecosystem where AI systems are key players raises fundamental questions about the meaning and value of this process, and what level of trust we should have in AI scientists. Is this the kind of scientific ecosystem we want?
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Effect of clays incorporation on properties of thermoplastic starch/clay composite bio-based polymer blends
- Soledad Cecilia Pech-Cohuo
- Mario Adrián de Atocha Dzul-Cervantes
- Yamile Pérez‑Padilla
Practical preparation of unsaturated very-long-chain fatty acids (VLCFAs) and very-long-chain alkene pollinator attractants
- Björn Bohman
- Aylin J. Bersch
- Philipp M. Schlüter
Experimental study of dual-cycle thermal management system for engineering radiator
- Wenbao Zhang
- Huimin Zhao
Computational investigation on physical properties of lead based perovskite RPbBr 3 (R = Cs, Hg, and Ga) materials for photovoltaic applications
- Muhammad Khuram Shahzad
- Shoukat Hussain
- Waqar Azeem
Rotation insensitive implantable wireless power transfer system for medical devices using metamaterial-polarization converter
- Tarakeswar Shaw
- Bappaditya Mandal
- Robin Augustine
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The impact of the digital economy on land transfer-out decisions among Chinese farmers: evidence from CHFS micro-data
- Peijiang Zheng
Infertility-related stress is associated with quality of life through negative emotions among infertile outpatients
- Li-ping Shi
- Yao-guo Geng
- Jing-jing Gu
Spatial spillover effect and driving factors of urban carbon emissions in the Yellow River Basin using nighttime light data
- Mingjuan Ma
- Yumeng Wang
Research on food security issues considering changes in rainfall
- SiMan Jiang
- Shuyue Chen
Drought prediction using artificial intelligence models based on climate data and soil moisture
- Mhamd Saifaldeen Oyounalsoud
- Abdullah Gokhan Yilmaz
- Abdulrahman Abdeljaber
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Mesenchymal stem cells from adipose tissue prone to lose their stemness associated markers in obesity related stress conditions
- Sura Hilal Ahmed Al-Sammarraie
- Şerife Ayaz-Güner
- Servet Özcan
Risk assessment and transmission of fluoroquinolone resistance in drug-resistant pulmonary tuberculosis: a retrospective genomic epidemiology study
- Vijayalakshmi Jawaharlal Nehru
- Maria Jose Vandakunnel
- Muthuraj Muthaiah
Self-reference and emotional reaction drive aesthetic judgment
- Sara Salgues
- Amélie Jacquot
- Marco Sperduti
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Malnutrition stratified by marasmus and kwashiorkor in adult patients with heart failure
- Akiomi Yoshihisa
- Yasuchika Takeishi
Efficacy of various techniques in calcium silicate-based intracanal medicament removal: a micro-CT analysis
- Rahaf A. Almohareb
- Reem M. Barakat
- Hanan Balto
The association between dietary habits and self-care behavior of pregnant women with pregnancy complications
- Mehdi Karimi
- Maryam Mofidi Nejad
- Leila Azadbakht
Effect of nutrition education on the nutritional status of pregnant women in Robe and Goba Towns, Southeast Ethiopia, using a cluster randomized controlled trial
- Girma Beressa
- Susan J. Whiting
- Tefera Belachew
Predictive validity of resource-adjusted Korean Triage and Acuity Scale in pediatric gastrointestinal tract foreign body patients
- Jin Hee Lee
- Jin Hee Jung
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The influence of exploration activities of a potential lithium mine to the environment in Western Serbia
Patients recovering from COVID-19 who presented with anosmia during their acute episode have behavioral, functional, and structural brain alterations
Estimating the prevalence of Non-Verbal Learning Disability (NVLD) from the ABCD sample
Daily supplementation with the Lab4P probiotic consortium induces significant weight loss in overweight adults
Science jobs, senior researcher-experimental leukemia modeling, mullighan lab.
Memphis, Tennessee
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The Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics in the Wayne State University School of Medicine (http://genetics.wayne.edu/) is expanding its high-...
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Wayne State University
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China beats US in top global scientific ‘hot papers’ ranking: report
- The number of ‘hot papers’ – those that receive instant recognition – published by Chinese scientists has topped a global list
- China also came first in six major disciplines on a chart tracking international citations of scientific papers
A key US-China science cooperation deal is about to end
Hot papers are often measured in bimonthly periods rather than years. They need to be no more than two years old and have citations among the top 0.1 per cent in their field over the past two months.
In comparison, another indicator known as highly cited papers are based on 10 years of publication data, and refer to the top 1 per cent of papers which often lead to fundamental breakthroughs in their field.
In terms of highly cited papers, the report found China remained in second place with 57,900 papers, while the US took the lead with a total of 76,600 highly cited papers. This amounted to 41 per cent of the global total.
The report also noted a significant increase in the proportion of high-quality, high-influence Chinese papers published in domestic, rather than Western, journals.
“The impact of China’s core scientific and technological journals continues to grow, and their ability to attract high-level papers has been going up steadily,” the report said.
Last year, domestic journals published nearly 42,000 research papers with regard to national major projects and key research and development programmes, covering a wide range of disciplines including clinical medicine, agriculture, environmental sciences, electronics, communications and earth sciences, the report said.
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Single-molecule structural and kinetic studies across sequence space. by. Ivo Severins. Carolien Bastiaanssen. Sung Hyun Kim. Roy B. Simons. John van Noort. Chirlmin Joo. Science Vol. 385, NO. 6711 22 Aug 2024 : 898-904.
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SSRN eLibrary offers a vast collection of research papers across various disciplines, providing valuable resources for researchers.
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Science News features daily news articles, feature stories, reviews and more in all disciplines of science, as well as Science News magazine archives back to 1924.
Science, founded by Thomas A. Edison in 1880 and published by AAAS, today ranks as the world's largest circulation general science journal. Published 51 times a year, Science is renowned for its highly cited, peer-reviewed research papers, its special strength in life science disciplines, and its award-winning coverage of breaking science news ...
Find the right journal for your research. Looking for the best journal match for your paper? Search the world's leading source of academic journals using your abstract or your keywords and other details. More on how it works.
Library & Information Science Research, a cross-disciplinary and refereed journal, focuses on the research process in library and information science, especially demonstrations of innovative methods and theoretical frameworks or unusual extensions or applications of well-known methods and tools. …. View full aims & scope.
Journal Top 100 This collection highlights our most downloaded* research papers published in 2021. Featuring authors from around the world, these papers highlight valuable research from an ...
Vimeo: 3Qs with GW's Andrew Barr: New research finds fossil hotspots in Africa obscure a more complete picture of human evolution (GW Media Relations) Journal Reference : W. Andrew Barr, Bernard Wood.
A major challenge of AI + Science lies in their inherent incompatibility: today's AI is primarily based on connectionism, while science depends on symbolism. To bridge the two worlds, we propose a framework to seamlessly synergize Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) and science. The framework highlights KANs' usage for three aspects of scientific discovery: identifying relevant features ...
The 100 most-cited scientific papers. Here at Science we love ranking things, so we were thrilled with this list of the top 100 most-cited scientific papers, courtesy of Nature. Surprisingly absent are many of the landmark discoveries you might expect, such as the discovery of DNA's double helix structure.
ScienceOpen is a research, networking, and discovery platform. We specialize in: Smart search and discovery within an interactive interface. Researcher promotion and ORCID integration. Open evaluation with article reviews and Collections. Business model based on providing services to publishers.
The Sakana system tries to address interestingness in two ways. First, it "scores" new paper ideas for similarity to existing research (indexed in the Semantic Scholar repository). Anything ...
The names given to series of these publications vary, but are often such generic terms as "technical reports," "working papers," "research memoranda," "internal notes," "occasional papers," "discussion papers" or "gray (or grey) literature." In the physical and natural sciences, "technical report" seems to be the preferred designation.
AI research may exacerbate existing problems. While Sakana AI states it doesn't see the role of human scientists diminishing, the company's vision of "a fully AI-driven scientific ecosystem" would have major implications for science.. One concern is that, if AI-generated papers flood the scientific literature, future AI systems may be trained on AI output and undergo model collapse.
The virtual special issue aims to provide timely outlets for innovative, cutting-edge research on the aforementioned topics and beyond. Deadline for submission is December 31, 2025. A paper submitted to the virtual special issue will be processed right away, and accepted papers will be published in regular issues without delay.
The research presented here proposes a completely innovative interpretation of how this colossal monument was built. ... (iii) the depth of the foundations. Our results show that Menga is a unique example of creative genius and early science among Neolithic societies. It was designed as a completely original engineering project, for which we ...
Publish with Scientific Reports We're an open-access journal publishing rigorously peer-reviewed research from across the natural sciences, psychology, medicine and engineering.
Last year, domestic journals published nearly 42,000 research papers with regard to national major projects and key research and development programmes, covering a wide range of disciplines ...