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Many of my computational scientist colleagues used to use Google Reader to share and discuss new journal articles. The loss of Reader's social features killed that, and we have subsequently tried Google+ and Reddit, but neither seems to work nearly as well as Reader did for holding this kind of discussion. Does anyone have experience using a site they like for this purpose?

I'm aware of a few options, like http://annotatr.appspot.com/, that seem promising but appear not to be actually used much.

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There was a site called Phygg that aimed to do this for papers on arXiv, but it shut down due to low participation. – David Zaslavsky Feb 1 '12 at 22:06
Can you describe a little better how the discussion went on Reader and what Google+ is lacking? – Bill Barth Feb 1 '12 at 22:49
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With Google Reader you'd get tightly connected groups wherein one person in the group would share a paper from the journal/arxiv RSS feed and then a number of people would comment on it, often prompted by questions posited by the original sharer. These comments would be semi-private based upon how many people the original poster shared it with. – Peter Brune Feb 2 '12 at 2:05
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There have been quite a few attempts at providing a comment/review system overlay on top of the arXiv, including scirate.com (defunct) and science-advisor.net. – ihuston Feb 3 '12 at 12:03
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Why not use blogs? You can make them private if you want only group members to have access. – Artem Kaznatcheev Jul 10 '12 at 17:38
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migrated from scicomp.stackexchange.com Jul 10 '12 at 17:09

3 Answers

up vote 9 down vote

Might I suggest http://scicomp.stackexchange.com ?

While the StackExchange system isn't the best - and indeed isn't designed - for "discussion", I've found that many "What did you think of this paper" type questions can be phrased in SE-compatible formats. CrossValidated has a semi-periodic "Journal Club" bit, and questions and musings about scientific papers come up a fair amount there.

I think if framed correctly, they might find a useful home here.

Generally though, I think the online discussion of scientific papers suffers from a few problems. Generally, the two I find the most problematic:

  1. Lack of a clear community to talk about papers in. Essentially, the problem your question is looking for an answer to. I haven't found a really good general purpose one, though I would love to if I did find it. There's blogs and the like, but even the ones talking about peer-reviewed papers are somewhat one sided in terms of their communication, and not great for anything but transient chatter.
  2. A hesitation to talk about that online. Among colleagues, it seems somewhat easier to summarize things like "Bad paper is bad", or slice apart someone's methodology. I'd be somewhat more hesitant to do that anywhere where my identity is both traceable and the conversation is saved for eternity (the internet).
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There is value in being able to be blunt with colleagues about your opinions on papers and techniques. I don't think that SciComp is the right place for that. – Jack Poulson Feb 2 '12 at 0:26
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I think the lack of anonymity in a public forum will be a deal-breaker for many due to academic politics and fear of reprisal, even if a review is balanced, tactfully pointing out both strengths and weaknesses. People prefer closed fora to avoid this drawback. – Geoff Oxberry Feb 2 '12 at 6:13
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@JackPoulson I think that it depends on what you mean by 'discussion'. SciComp is probably the right place for certain types of discussion. Things like 'In the paper by EpiGrad et al., can someone explain to me what they mean by X'? – EpiGrad Feb 2 '12 at 7:14
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@Epigrad: I think the idea is to do a serious discussion of the intellectual merits and disadvantages of individual papers, as well as areas of research. That's somewhat orthogonal to the goal of SE. – aeismail♦ Feb 2 '12 at 9:41
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It is my impression that the Scicomp SE is for specific questions pertaining to (mostly) objective technical knowledge and not for subjective value judgments journal papers or research programs. – Paul Jul 13 '12 at 14:58
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up vote 6 down vote

We actually started a site for this called Plasmyd, it lets you search for papers and comment on them to start these discussions. Check it out, and please contact me personally if there's something you want to see on the site!

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Hey, welcome to Academia.SE! The site looks interesting... could you add more detail to the post about how the site can be used? (E.g., how to submit discussions, any journal club "rooms", how to sharing comments, etc.) – eykanal♦ Jul 27 '12 at 2:41
Interesting. Is it just for specific disciplines? There don't seem to be any mathematics papers. – David Ketcheson Jul 27 '12 at 9:51
Great site! @DavidKetcheson Plasmyd is seems to be a relatively new site, so hopefully in future there will be more math papers etc. btw, I understand that currently research is quite a 'secretive' thing but... it would be awesome if people who write research would publish 'side-notes' for example, if mathematicians would publish all those 'in-between' things that they cut out of their papers. It may be 'unprofessional' but extremely useful for people interested in understanding the research. Just saying! It would be great if it would be incorporated in the Plasmyd site. Bravo! – user3992 Jan 31 at 4:06
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I haven't used it personally so I can't vouch for its quality, but I know several people in another research group using a site called Journal Fire for this purpose. Might want to check it out.

Also, I think the citation manager and social network Mendeley has some limited discussion capabilities, but I prefer to manage my references with BibDesk so I haven't use it much.

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+1 for JournalFire -- it looks good, if I can just get my collaborators to use it too. I use Mendeley, but not for discussions; its interface is not well-suited. – David Ketcheson Jul 12 '12 at 6:22

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