Place to discuss scholarly publications online?

October 20, 2008 8:36 PM

Is there a good place to discuss scholarly publications online?

Peer reviewed journals and conference publications are the lifeblood of academic research. Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) provides a decent search of this domain, but what I'd love to find is a universal message board where scholarly articles can be pinned and discussed at length, ideally with a rating & filtering system a la slashdot.

Is there such a thing? If not, can Google build it? :)

posted by ivarley to education (6 comments total)

As best as I know, the scholarly way to discuss scholarly articles is to write and submit another scholarly article to the journal itself. The basic problem is not one of technology but incentives. The authors of most peer reviewed journal articles are unlikely to waste time "discuss at length" on sites like Slashdot. Especially since tenure is based on scholarly publication not public flamewars.
posted by pwnguin at 9:42 PM on October 20, 2008

Elsevier have tried to sprinkle some magical pixie web 2.0 dust on their business model here, but I have never used the site and don't know anyone who does.

Other than that, how about a pony request for ScholarFilter?
posted by ghost of a past number at 10:40 PM on October 20, 2008

Academics discuss articles by talking at conferences & seminars. A very public discussion form has nothing to offer but noise. By comparison, Stephen Wolfram sponsors conferences just to get mathematicians to listen to him. A bit step next to the $5 filter, no? Of course, wikipedia.org & knol.google.com offer methods for productively discussing articles, but they are obviously not discussion forms since they have goals.

You will however find many existing weblogs run by academics which focus on their field, this is especially common in physics and computer science. I doubt you'll find many "community weblogs" but there are some community wikis. You can also find many email lists for specific fields. Such community stuff will welcome questions from student, but they won't appreciate stupid public commentary. Academic bloggers however won't mind the attention.

I'd say you're biggest centralized discussion option is still Usenet, which carries discussion on virtually any topic imaginable. But you can always post about an article on metafilter if you find it very interesting. If you have specific question, then I'd say that ask.metafilter.com is a great venue for such discussion.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:15 AM on October 21, 2008

I sometimes see cool comments (notes, questions) in the "reviews" and "notes" section of cite u like. But this site hasn't been taken up by the vast majority of scholarly workers (faculty, students, researchers). It's mostly science stuff and very thin on the humanities.
posted by zpousman at 5:54 AM on October 21, 2008 [1 favorite]

not quite what you're after but it might be worth looking at researchblogging.org and the associated blog comments. Also, PLOS allows comments and discussion to be made about some (all?) of their published papers.
posted by tnai at 10:59 AM on October 21, 2008 [1 favorite]

I think this is definitely a gap in the social web market that needs filling.

The closest I've seen to what you talk about is the "About this book" page for scholarly books in google books, which does a nice job of aggregating opinions and reviews
posted by cgfoz at 4:59 AM on October 29, 2008