Research Tools

As researchers, we often neglect finding the right tools to streamline the progress. Financial Machine Learning is no different in that a lot of the papers are scattered across different journals and different fields. Ranging from journals on econometrics to machine learning, researchers often struggle to find the best academic papers to begin their studies.

At Hudson & Thames, we primarily use two resources: Connected Papers and EThOS. These two free sites have been invaluable and offer an advantage to search through the most cutting edge resources available for our MlFinLab library.

Connected Papers

Connected papers is unique in that it is not a citation tree. A citation from a paper does not necessarily lead the reader to another paper. The two topics might be completely different and an unimportant topic for the researcher.

It uniquely identifies the related papers by looking at the cocitation and bibliographic coupling. More about the website is available at the connected papers founder’s medium post.

To give a brief demonstration, we will examine a paper by Li and Hoi that started our Online Portfolio Selection module.

If you type in the name of the paper, you will see a graph like the one below.

It immediately shows which are the most associated papers. The darker circles indicate that they are more recent, so we can easily follow from the older papers to the newer ones. Connected papers also has an amazing feature for prior works and derivative works.

Prior works is available for researchers to see what are the most famous and cited papers in this field to recognize the importance and start with the baseline material. If we click the button for prior works, for our current search, we see an image like this:

We can easily see which were the most cited papers. It is not surprising that the number one paper associated with Online Portfolio Selection is Thomas Cover’s Universal Portfolio, the original paper that began the studies in Portfolio Selection based on information theory.

Once the researcher gets more familiar with the topic by going through literature review with prior works, they can move on to the derivative works, which cover the most recent papers associated with the paper of interest.

EThOS

EThOS is a online library sponsored by the United Kingdom to make publicly-funded research available to all researchers.

The best feature for EThOS is the availability of all doctoral theses in the UK. If your topic of interest does not have too many sources from journals, there is a high chance that you can find good works in EThOS as it is not limited to published journals but rather all doctoral theses as well.