2021 - All Press Releases

Springer Nature advances its machine-generated tools and offers a new book format with AI-based literature overviews

Climate, Planetary and Evolutionary Sciences: A Machine-Generated Literature Overview marks a further step in the innovation journey of publishing services at Springer Nature 

London | Heidelberg, 04 May 2021 

Following the publication of its first machine-generated book in 2019, Springer Nature has now deployed its AI expertise to create a new publication format which focuses on literature reviews. While the first book on lithium-ion batteries was entirely AI-based, this new format takes an innovative hybrid approach of blending human-machine interaction. The new product is a mixture of human-written text and machine-generated literature overviews, which sees an author putting these machine-generated reviews, created from a large set of previously published articles in Springer Nature journals, into book chapters and providing a scientific perspective.

Climate, Planetary and Evolutionary Sciences: A Machine-Generated Literature Overview, edited by Guido Visconti, is the first publication of this kind. Professor Guido Visconti devised a series of questions and keywords related to different aspects of climate studies, examining their most recent developments and their most practical applications. These were queried, discovered, collated and structured by the machine using AI clustering with the results presented in a series of book chapters for Prof Visconti to put into scientific context. This combined approach of human-machine interaction was able to reveal the complex and interdisciplinary nature of the climate, planetary and evolution sciences. Springer Nature is planning a further development of this new format and making human-machine collaboration part of its publishing experience.

Professor Guido Visconti said: 
“It was very exciting to be part of such an innovative experiment. It enabled me to discover interesting aspects I had previously neglected, stimulating me to find out additional citations and references. The AI was able to find such connections producing a wealth of data which are summarized in the chapters of the book. The peculiarities of the topics demonstrate that the same process could be applied to any scientific sector producing summaries which are very useful for both the professional and academic work or for the students that face for the first time the research literature or pursue PhD objectives.”

Stephanie Preuss, Senior Manager Product and Content Solutions, Book Publishing Solutions at Springer Nature, said: 
“This is an exciting step in our innovation journey that started with the first machine-generated book, as this is effectively a new type of book format that resembles a kind of dialogue between the author (now editor) and the machine. We are looking forward to seeing how this joint journey of authors, publishers, and machines helps advance science and show authors surprising new opportunities for future research. We hope others will be inspired and invite the submission of new ideas to produce similar publications in other research areas.” 

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About the editor and the book

Guido Visconti is Professor Emeritus at Università dell'Aquila, Italy and a member of the National Academy of Lincei. He has held a Fulbright Fellowship (1968-69), University of Maryland (USA). NATO Fellowship, Dept of Meteorology, MIT, USA, (1976, 1977). NATO Senior Fellowship, NCAR, USA (1986 -1987). He has served as committee member of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climatic Change (IPCC) and Member of the International Ozone Commission (WMO). In his long career he was the Principal Investigator UARS Correlative Measurements Program (NASA) and Atmospheric Effects of Supersonic Airplane (AESA, NASA). He is the author of the following books; Fundamentals of Physics and Chemistry of the Atmosphere, Second Edition, (2016), Problems, Philosophy and Politics of Climate Science, (2018) and Fluid dynamics (2020).

Guido Visconti 
Climate, Planetary and Evolutionary Sciences: A Machine-Generated Literature Overview 
2021, 372 pp with 1 b/w illustration 
Ebook €106,99 | $119.00 | £87.50 
eISBN 978-3-030-74713-8
ISBN 978-3-030-74712-1

Services for Journalists 

Journalists can request a review copy of the book Climate, Planetary and Evolutionary Sciences. 

About Springer Nature

For over 175 years Springer Nature has been advancing discovery by providing the best possible service to the whole research community. We help researchers uncover new ideas, make sure all the research we publish is significant, robust and stands up to objective scrutiny, that it reaches all relevant audiences in the best possible format, and can be discovered, accessed, used, re-used and shared. We support librarians and institutions with innovations in technology and data; and provide quality publishing support to societies. 

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