3 ms·

Sorry, you're right, I conflated curation with peer-review. Is curation much harder? It seems like if you're already reviewing, you're most of the way there.

by MBlume 14y ago

rayiner 14y ago
It's not about whether it's hard or not, it's about supply and demand for curation. Effective curation depends on the readers' faith in the organization to back quality articles, and there is a limited supply of such organizations. E.g. if I type "economics of deflation" into Google, I get: wikipedia, a youtube video, "tutor2u.net", and investopedia among other things. Businessweek and the Economist show up on the bottom half of the first page. The first several pages of results are full of Austrian and Mises gibberish--lot's of "counter conventional wisdom" sites. This is why I don't go to Google to research economics. I don't trust it to pick quality research. So where do I turn? "tutor2u.net?" No. I have no idea whether they can be trusted or not. So I use signaling and proxies. I look for things that have "Harvard" or "London School of Economics" domains. The folks at Harvard and LSE long ago figured out that basic dynamic, and that's why they use their names to publish journals. Is it a hard job other people couldn't do? No. But the journals exist because we trust Harvard to do the job, and we don't trust "tutor2u.net". My wife actually hates the NIH open access policy for this reason. She argues a lot on the internet about pediatrics/child birth. She gets crazies who peddle crackpot theories by citing to sketchy papers that happen to be hosted on an NIH domain. They assume that by hosting those papers, NIH vouches for the content in those papers, but of course that's not the case.
- adiM 14y ago
  If you are interested in academic articles, why not search on google scholar? It provides much more relevant results.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Google scholar indexes journal databases and so takes advantage of that filtering that has already been done by the journals. Yes its more relevant, but we're talking about alternatives to the journals.

Sorry, you're right, I conflated curation with peer-review. Is curation much harder? It seems like if you're already reviewing, you're most of the way there.

by MBlume 14y ago

Sorry, you're right, I conflated curation with peer-review. Is curation much harder? It seems like if you're already reviewing, you're most of the way there.

rayiner 14y ago

It's not about whether it's hard or not, it's about supply and demand for curation. Effective curation depends on the readers' faith in the organization to back quality articles, and there is a limited supply of such organizations. E.g. if I type "economics of deflation" into Google, I get: wikipedia, a youtube video, "tutor2u.net", and investopedia among other things. Businessweek and the Economist show up on the bottom half of the first page. The first several pages of results are full of Austrian and Mises gibberish--lot's of "counter conventional wisdom" sites. This is why I don't go to Google to research economics. I don't trust it to pick quality research. So where do I turn? "tutor2u.net?" No. I have no idea whether they can be trusted or not. So I use signaling and proxies. I look for things that have "Harvard" or "London School of Economics" domains. The folks at Harvard and LSE long ago figured out that basic dynamic, and that's why they use their names to publish journals. Is it a hard job other people couldn't do? No. But the journals exist because we trust Harvard to do the job, and we don't trust "tutor2u.net". My wife actually hates the NIH open access policy for this reason. She argues a lot on the internet about pediatrics/child birth. She gets crazies who peddle crackpot theories by citing to sketchy papers that happen to be hosted on an NIH domain. They assume that by hosting those papers, NIH vouches for the content in those papers, but of course that's not the case.

adiM 14y ago
If you are interested in academic articles, why not search on google scholar? It provides much more relevant results.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Google scholar indexes journal databases and so takes advantage of that filtering that has already been done by the journals. Yes its more relevant, but we're talking about alternatives to the journals.