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A better tagline than "Hacker News for researchers" might be "Crowdsourced Faculty 1000". Either way, I wish you luck, as getting a critical mass of engaged use

A better tagline than "Hacker News for researchers" might be "Crowdsourced Faculty 1000". Either way, I wish you luck, as getting a critical mass of engaged users in this area is a very difficult task. So many people do read and review papers, but then those reviews are just kept in a private file somewhere (or just in their brains) and hardly anyone sees them. So much great insight into published science is lost to the public this way. Lately I've been trying to blog about papers I read and then share my blog posts with http://www.researchblogging.org/ http://www.researchblogging.org/, but even that isn't a very common thing to do. If your site could become a hub for this type of discussion, it would be wonderful. Do you support (or plan on supporting) a researchblogging-like trackback system, in addition to comments? That might help you gain publicity too, if popular science bloggers link to your website when they discuss a paper.

wenxun 15y ago
Thank you for your input, yes, it is hard to attract users in this field, reaching a critical mass is even harder, and feel free to share the papers your read with PubUp. We just launched 3 days ago, and welcome all kinds of ideas. Can you explain a bit "a researchblogging-like trackback system"? PubUp.org does have a trackback when users link to the URLs of other sources. I took a look at your site, seems a very nice blog!
- streptomycin 15y ago
  I just mean that you should make it easy for bloggers to work with your website, to leverage the science blogging community. Research Blogging isn't my website, BTW, I just submit articles there sometimes. But it's something you should look at. All these independent blogs write about papers, submit their blog posts to Research Blogging (baasically like a trackback) and then they are indexed and publicized by Research Blogging. You could maybe do something similar... say, add upvote/downvote buttons people could use that would link to an article on your site, and then have a trackback on that article linking to the blog post.
  - wenxun 15y ago
    Yes, that's a good point. I think in addition to sharing research articles and reviews, the PubUp system can also be used to post or link to scientific news, blog posts, or anything related to the community, that's why we have a "News" category in addition to the "Bio, Chem, CS, Math, Physics, etc" categories.

wenxun 15y ago

Thank you for your input, yes, it is hard to attract users in this field, reaching a critical mass is even harder, and feel free to share the papers your read with PubUp. We just launched 3 days ago, and welcome all kinds of ideas. Can you explain a bit "a researchblogging-like trackback system"? PubUp.org does have a trackback when users link to the URLs of other sources. I took a look at your site, seems a very nice blog!

streptomycin 15y ago
I just mean that you should make it easy for bloggers to work with your website, to leverage the science blogging community. Research Blogging isn't my website, BTW, I just submit articles there sometimes. But it's something you should look at. All these independent blogs write about papers, submit their blog posts to Research Blogging (baasically like a trackback) and then they are indexed and publicized by Research Blogging. You could maybe do something similar... say, add upvote/downvote buttons people could use that would link to an article on your site, and then have a trackback on that article linking to the blog post.
- wenxun 15y ago
  Yes, that's a good point. I think in addition to sharing research articles and reviews, the PubUp system can also be used to post or link to scientific news, blog posts, or anything related to the community, that's why we have a "News" category in addition to the "Bio, Chem, CS, Math, Physics, etc" categories.