Encountering a new paper can change a research idea's trajectory. The researcher may discover that someone has already addressed their proposed contribution, or find an unresolved problem in the paper that inspires a new direction of inquiry.
We call this process a literature-initiated pivot: a change in research direction prompted by reading prior work. It connects two activities that researchers often have to manage separately: developing an idea and deciding which literature to measure it against.
With collaborators at the University of Pennsylvania, we developed LitPivot, a system that helps researchers navigate these pivots. Using papers retrieved through Asta Paper Finder, LitPivot organizes literature around the part of a proposal being edited, offers critiques supported by excerpts from selected studies, and suggests revisions that researchers can accept, edit, or reject. LitPivot is intended to be used for early-stage research ideation, but the idea could possibly extend to longer writing tasks (i.e., writing the introduction section of a paper).
