7 ms·

Is there any centralized place for all peer reviewed articles? As a programmer (and not as an academic person), I have no idea how to check if an article was p

by yonixw 4y ago

Is there any centralized place for all peer reviewed articles? As a programmer (and not as an academic person), I have no idea how to check if an article was peer reviewed or had harsh response from academic sources. I wish it was like npmjs.com who provides me an audit tool for their Nodejs packages in the same npm CLI.

hprotagonist 4y ago
There isn't, at all, and there never will be. It's on you to go sniff the butt of the journal that publishes a research article and see if they're legit. You're also on the hook for seeing if there have been any retractions, letters of concern, articles in reply, and who if anyone cited the thing you're reading. Some journals offer tools specific to themselves to help you with some of this, and there are a few non-journal services that can help you get some of this information across journals (google scholar, pubmed, etc...) but they're scattershot and discipline specific.
- yonixw 4y ago
  Why not, though? After all, I'm sure a large university like MIT has a lot to gain from a site like this that promotes them to the top of the list as someone who publishes genuine papers.
  - hprotagonist 4y ago
    They will be, and are, merely one among many. What grants MIT the authority to be The One Source Of Truth? Why? Who compels it?
    - hnfong 4y ago
      Obviously the fruits of all human knowledge should be on a blockchain....
  - jhbadger 4y ago
    Although there are some journals that are "open access" and encourage mirroring their papers, most are not so and consider mirroring their articles to be piracy -- so until copyright law is reformed, there can never be a (legal) repository of the scientific literature, although projects like Sci-Hub exist just as things like Pirate Bay do.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  And that the authors don't have conflicts of interest. It's a decentralized unregulated reader-beware system. Even the good journals, say like Nature, are still just private companies that make up and then follow their own rules which they could change or ignore at will. Good science happens all the time, but, BS also gets published and, sadly, often gets more attention than the legit stuff because its more sensational. Its a tough problem with no easy solution.
- geysersam 4y ago
  > There never will be. That's overly pessimistic. There's lots of effort making publicly funded research more accessible.
  - nixpulvis 4y ago
    The issue is with the "for all" statement.
    - geysersam 4y ago
      Never is a strong word, considering science publishing in the current form is barely a century old.
  - hprotagonist 4y ago
    In the history of mankind, have everyone alive at one time all collectively agreed that That Thing Over There Is The One We Trust? You won't get universal consensus on authority. That's not pessimism; that's an odd kind of optimism, really...
    - geysersam 4y ago
      Don't see what trust you are talking about. There's no need to have "one thing". The important thing is that the research is public. If it lives in multiple repositories is irrelevant. Just have an aggregator query the 10 biggest of those and we're done. SciHub already achieves this without any support from institutions or universities, that ought to convince anyone that it's possible.
- theduder99 4y ago
  maybe a business opportunity for someone reading this thread
igorkraw 4y ago
There's peerpub and retractionwatch, but that's about it I believe. Science is inherently decentralised
dekhn 4y ago
I don't use peer reviews as a proxy for paper quality. Many great papers had terrible peer reviews, and vice versa. Enough that it's not really a predictor of anything.
- jhbadger 4y ago
  It's an imperfect measure to be sure (peer reviewers are humans), but it's the best criterion anyone has ever come up with so far. It certainly weeds out a lot of cranks (even if it on rare occasions mistakes a novel genius for a crank), and isn't that robust to deliberate fraud (peer reviewers generally look for errors in analysis or lack of needed controls rather than look for faked data).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
samizdis 4y ago
> Is there any centralized place for all peer reviewed articles? There isn't one, as far as I know, but supposedly one can turn to bona fide publications for peer-reviewed studies/reports etc; there are specialist journals about almost any science subject, however mainstream or niche. However, the peer-review process is increasingly discredited/broken, according to articles such as this recent example [1] Peer review is frustrating and flawed – here’s how we can fix it. It would also seem that many supposedly reputable journals often publish without due diligence, too. The site Retraction Watch [2] exists to draw attention to published papers subsequently having to be withdrawn. Reasons for retractions can be poor methodology, dubious authorship and lots more - which point to failings in the peer-review system. [1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/peer-review-frustrating-and-flawed-heres-how-we-can-fix-it https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/peer-review-frus... [2] https://retractionwatch.com/ https://retractionwatch.com/
valarauko 4y ago
> how to check if an article was peer reviewed or had harsh response from academic sources. This is a different problem than the issue of a central repository for all peer reviewed articles. Some journals allow you to see the trail of the actual peer review (questions raised by reviewers, responses & changes made by authors, etc) but this is far from the norm. The standard practice is to only offer the final version of the article, and to not release the trail of peer review to the general public. pubpeer.com does allow people to raise concerns and discuss individual publications for technical issues/plagarism, and its typical for the authors to come on there and provide further information or clarifications. Pubpeer however is a third party site distinct from the peer review process that journals do before publication. It's also not uncommon to see papers pulled due to concerns raised on pubpeer.

by yonixw 4y ago

hprotagonist 4y ago

There isn't, at all, and there never will be. It's on you to go sniff the butt of the journal that publishes a research article and see if they're legit. You're also on the hook for seeing if there have been any retractions, letters of concern, articles in reply, and who if anyone cited the thing you're reading. Some journals offer tools specific to themselves to help you with some of this, and there are a few non-journal services that can help you get some of this information across journals (google scholar, pubmed, etc...) but they're scattershot and discipline specific.

yonixw 4y ago
Why not, though? After all, I'm sure a large university like MIT has a lot to gain from a site like this that promotes them to the top of the list as someone who publishes genuine papers.
- hprotagonist 4y ago
  They will be, and are, merely one among many. What grants MIT the authority to be The One Source Of Truth? Why? Who compels it?
  - hnfong 4y ago
    Obviously the fruits of all human knowledge should be on a blockchain....
- jhbadger 4y ago
  Although there are some journals that are "open access" and encourage mirroring their papers, most are not so and consider mirroring their articles to be piracy -- so until copyright law is reformed, there can never be a (legal) repository of the scientific literature, although projects like Sci-Hub exist just as things like Pirate Bay do.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
And that the authors don't have conflicts of interest. It's a decentralized unregulated reader-beware system. Even the good journals, say like Nature, are still just private companies that make up and then follow their own rules which they could change or ignore at will. Good science happens all the time, but, BS also gets published and, sadly, often gets more attention than the legit stuff because its more sensational. Its a tough problem with no easy solution.
geysersam 4y ago
> There never will be. That's overly pessimistic. There's lots of effort making publicly funded research more accessible.
- nixpulvis 4y ago
  The issue is with the "for all" statement.
  - geysersam 4y ago
    Never is a strong word, considering science publishing in the current form is barely a century old.
- hprotagonist 4y ago
  In the history of mankind, have everyone alive at one time all collectively agreed that That Thing Over There Is The One We Trust? You won't get universal consensus on authority. That's not pessimism; that's an odd kind of optimism, really...
  - geysersam 4y ago
    Don't see what trust you are talking about. There's no need to have "one thing". The important thing is that the research is public. If it lives in multiple repositories is irrelevant. Just have an aggregator query the 10 biggest of those and we're done. SciHub already achieves this without any support from institutions or universities, that ought to convince anyone that it's possible.
theduder99 4y ago
maybe a business opportunity for someone reading this thread

igorkraw 4y ago

There's peerpub and retractionwatch, but that's about it I believe. Science is inherently decentralised

dekhn 4y ago

I don't use peer reviews as a proxy for paper quality. Many great papers had terrible peer reviews, and vice versa. Enough that it's not really a predictor of anything.

jhbadger 4y ago
It's an imperfect measure to be sure (peer reviewers are humans), but it's the best criterion anyone has ever come up with so far. It certainly weeds out a lot of cranks (even if it on rare occasions mistakes a novel genius for a crank), and isn't that robust to deliberate fraud (peer reviewers generally look for errors in analysis or lack of needed controls rather than look for faked data).

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

samizdis 4y ago

> Is there any centralized place for all peer reviewed articles? There isn't one, as far as I know, but supposedly one can turn to bona fide publications for peer-reviewed studies/reports etc; there are specialist journals about almost any science subject, however mainstream or niche. However, the peer-review process is increasingly discredited/broken, according to articles such as this recent example [1] Peer review is frustrating and flawed – here’s how we can fix it. It would also seem that many supposedly reputable journals often publish without due diligence, too. The site Retraction Watch [2] exists to draw attention to published papers subsequently having to be withdrawn. Reasons for retractions can be poor methodology, dubious authorship and lots more - which point to failings in the peer-review system. [1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/peer-review-frustrating-and-flawed-heres-how-we-can-fix-it https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/peer-review-frus... [2] https://retractionwatch.com/ https://retractionwatch.com/

valarauko 4y ago

> how to check if an article was peer reviewed or had harsh response from academic sources. This is a different problem than the issue of a central repository for all peer reviewed articles. Some journals allow you to see the trail of the actual peer review (questions raised by reviewers, responses & changes made by authors, etc) but this is far from the norm. The standard practice is to only offer the final version of the article, and to not release the trail of peer review to the general public. pubpeer.com does allow people to raise concerns and discuss individual publications for technical issues/plagarism, and its typical for the authors to come on there and provide further information or clarifications. Pubpeer however is a third party site distinct from the peer review process that journals do before publication. It's also not uncommon to see papers pulled due to concerns raised on pubpeer.