4 ms·
Where do scientists comment on publications?
It looks like effective platforms for this are virtually non-existent.
- Satifer 11y agoDiscussion is paramount to both ideation and understanding. Why don't we see more public discussions among academics?
- dalke 11y agoAre you referring to systems like PubPeer and PubMed Commons? (Note: a New Zealand company in this field spammed me to get me to sign up, so that was an immediate "no" to wanting to even name them.) FWIW, I thought there was already a lot of public discussions among academics.
- geographomics 11y agoIn a sense, publishing a research paper is part of an ongoing public discussion, in reply to all the other authors cited in your work. Apart from that, there are talks at conferences which are open to discussion with the audience. I suppose there's not really a need for much more than that, in the public sphere. There is plenty of private discussion amongst one's peers of course.
- mandor 11y agoWe discuss a lot on mailing lists, live in conferences, and with personnal e-mails.
- elsherbini 11y agoPersonal blogs and twitter are the main outlets. See https://twitter.com/mbeisen https://twitter.com/mbeisen and http://www.michaeleisen.org/ http://www.michaeleisen.org/ for an example of an extremely publicly engaged scientist. You can poke around his twitter graph to see other hubs.
- Satifer 11y agoMichael Eisen is fantastic. There's a dramatic drop-off as far as public engagement of scientists goes. I'm not concerned only with "public" engagement, but informal discussion amongst a diverse crowd of academics.
- albusce 11y agoIt all depends on the research group... I see a lot of activity on Facebook when an interesting paper comes out. Also https://www.researchgate.net/ https://www.researchgate.net/ is quite popular, but mostly for pre-publication discussions. The whole http://arxiv.org/ http://arxiv.org/ system is designed to stimulate discussion before a paper is published.
- Satifer 11y agoThanks for your input. Right, people tend to bring these up on Facebook, but it's typically a scattered discussion. Are there any Facebook Groups in particular that you know of that facilitate informed, rational discussion?
- albusce 11y agoNo, I just know that a few research groups have discussions on their FB group. I guess the problem is that articles are very specialised, and so the number of people you can discuss with (and that are interested in doing that!) is quite small. So probably most of the discussion happens via closed communications means (vis-a-vis chat, email, ...) Of course very high impact papers are an exception with regards to that. To have a background idea: http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/killing-pigs-weed-maps-mostly-unread-world-academic-papers-76733 http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/killing-pigs-weed-map...
- Satifer 11y agoInteresting article. What I have in mind is the instances when I read a paper (read: dozens of papers on a refined area), the methods section leaves out 10-99% of the details, and I spend significant time and effort searching for the details if they exist at all anywhere.