The site was built to deal with my frustration at journalists summarizing scientific papers without citing their sources. It tries to infer from the details that they do include the probable candidate articles. It allows you to tell it when it's made a mistake - either correcting the detail such as author and journal, or better still, by supplying the article that it should have found in the first place for the benefit of other users.

The best way to get an idea what it does is to play with it - put a URL of a news story about a scientific research topic in the box, and see what papers it finds. Currently supported sites: BBC and Reuters.

If you add this "bookmarklet" (right-click and select "Bookmark this link): thesciencebehindit - and click on it when you're viewing a science or medicine story on a supported site, it should take you straight to the results on thesciencebehindit.net - it's much easier than faffing around pasting URLs about the place.

If you find some of the many inevitable problems, let me know: see the FAQ for my details. If the site is slow or unavailable, try coming back later - I'll be working to make it more reliable as much as possible. News of updates will be available on the blog here. It's been tested on Firefox and Opera.

Have fun - Adam