3 ms·
One thing I noticed is that there's a lit review at the beginning of most research papers. That's a lot of work just to get people up to speed. Thought not a
by curo 11y ago
One thing I noticed is that there's a lit review at the beginning of most research papers. That's a lot of work just to get people up to speed.
Thought not a complete solution, I envision a github-like environment for the research and links to wikis and other repos for the lit.
People could openly submit "bugs" with methodology or conflicts between studies (as a replacement or supplement for peer review). You'd be encouraged as an author to publish research that was well followed/starred, but most importantly you'd be flagged if you had a bunch of open bugs.
(Bug resolution then would have to be approved by not just the researcher, but perhaps an Stack Overflow-like "close" voting system.)
- kerzol 11y ago+1 to github-style journal. Also there is "The Self Journal of Science" that aims to fix peer-review and exterminate bad publishing habits --- http://sjscience.org/ http://sjscience.org/ And my marginal, but an open source project --- http://papers-gamma.link http://papers-gamma.link
- kerzol 11y agoAlso you have PKP, that even organises a conf about this stuff http://pkp.sfu.ca/pkp2015 http://pkp.sfu.ca/pkp2015
- irremediable 11y agoThis is a nifty idea. The only problem I see with it is that it makes papers far less self-contained. IMO some of the best-written papers let you understand something of their impact even if you're not too familiar with the field. Taking away the lit review hurts that. You might argue that a single collaborative lit review would do -- so readers could just print out that plus the paper. But often that lit review section is tailored to your specific goals and audience. To do it well, I think you'd end up having hundreds of such lit reviews for a given topic. In which case, why even bother? (I didn't mean to sound so harsh, by the way! I do quite like the idea of bringing some of software's collaborative tools over to research.)
- curo 11y agoYea that's true. And I even enjoy that self-contained aspect of papers, especially when I'm reading up on an unfamiliar field. But perhaps they could be more high-level. Some authors go crazy. Say for instance, by explaining philosophy-of-mind concepts in an addiction paper.
- b_emery 11y agoIdeally the lit review is less a review and more of an outline of the current state of knowledge and, most importantly, where the gaps are (that this paper fills!). In practice you're often correct though, the lit review is more "look at all the papers I read".