3 ms·
It feels like we've lumped together a bunch of different use cases and metrics into the current publication system. 1) Authors need to get peer review, feedbac
by DocSavage 11y ago
It feels like we've lumped together a bunch of different use cases and metrics into the current publication system.
1) Authors need to get peer review, feedback to make their case stronger and improve the communication.
2) Researchers need a way of filtering the publications so they can find the gems in any field or ones very useful to their own work.
3) Then there's the need to evaluate how well particular people are doing in their research, which boils down to metrics including the prestige of the journal (immediate) and the number of citations it'll eventually accumulate (long term). I'm not aware of any distinction between citations of a work in an introduction or review and citations of a work that provided some essential part of the current method. These are pretty big differences since the former is more strongly influenced by reputation while the latter is its utility.
Here's how one alternative system would work:
Start with a github-like editing and annotation system for soliciting and coordinating feedback. This also allows readers and possible evaluation systems to see the types of contributions people make.
References would get more sophisticated with categories like "background material", "thought provoking previous work", and "indispensable to this work."
Publication initially goes to general repositories like arXiv where anyone can read it. Have an amped-up Google Scholar search where you can easily bookmark works of interest, tag them, and share them with colleagues. Different HN or reddit systems would spring up to bring better work to the attention of more researchers.
"Journals" have a panel of editors who select a subset of work to display under their banner. This is not mutually exclusive so particularly awesome work would be featured in Nature, Science, and more specialized journals in this alternate universe.
There would be a diversity of impact metrics including ones based purely on "my work would be impossible if not for this work X". Affiliation between authors could be factored into some metrics so greater impact is given to referenced work with more degrees of separation from the author's current and previous institutions.
- semi-extrinsic 11y agoI like the concept of semantic citations, e.g. "cited for methodX", but it's hard to make a general enough system out of this that doesn't disrupt the flow while reading. And in a way, we already do it, except that it's not being done in a consistent fashion that enables datamining of it. Getting publishers to standardize some markup for this would be cool, but I don't think the outcome justifies the added effort for everyone. As for several journals publishing the same thing: there are many problems withh that idea, not the least that Nature/Science doesn't want your paper with an 11 page methods section, they want something much closer to a popsci article. So you have to write several. This is already happening today, when someone gets to publish their supercool finding in Nature they also write one or more longer, detailed (i.e. proper) papers that are sent to more specific journals.
- DocSavage 11y ago"I like the concept of semantic citations, e.g. "cited for methodX", but it's hard to make a general enough system out of this that doesn't disrupt the flow while reading." The different types of citations would be different markup tags and the display to the reader wouldn't be any different than the current reference notation. Regarding the difference in ideal paper format between journals, I think there are already multiple detail levels prepared. Our Nature paper, for example, has a pretty significant supplemental information section. The standard could be three levels of detail: overview, standard, and detailed.
- semi-extrinsic 11y agoIf the reader can't see the semantic markup, then what's the main purpose, and how does this purpose justify the additional effort required, both to implement this system in a standardized way across journals, and by authors who have to tag their citations with this semantic markup?
- DocSavage 11y agoIt's for the algorithms that process papers to produce metrics. Display systems can choose to ignore it and show them all as [1] or might use color, hover message, or whatever to show the distinction in a way that doesn't alter the standard reading experience if that's desired.
- semi-extrinsic 11y agoThen I think there's no way that justifies the additional effort required both from people writing papers and for journals to implement this.