World-wide Journal Club?

March 9, 2009 10:22 AM

Is there a MeFi-like site that deals exclusively in academic writing?

Lunit's post today reminded me of how much I enjoy reading journal articles from fields outside my own. Then it set me to wondering if there was a single aggregator of scholarly articles from multiple disciplines-- a best-of site for science, engineering, and humanities writing. Is there such a thing on the tubes?

posted by The White Hat to computers & internet (9 answers total)

No comments, but Arts and Letters Daily would appear to fit the bill.
posted by Happy Dave at 10:40 AM on March 9, 2009

Arts and Letters Daily, while good, might not count as academic writing in the sense that you're looking for. It will point you to reviews of academic monographs published in magazines like TLS, or survey articles about recent research in Scientific American.

Could you specify your question, then? Are you looking for aggregator sites like that, or are you looking for ones that deal only in peer-reviewed, i.e. distinctly non-popular, publications? (A potential problem with the idea of the latter is that so many journals are accessible only by subscription.)
posted by Beardman at 10:49 AM on March 9, 2009

A one-time aggregation of great research papers was this question from AskMeFi back in ought-six.
posted by barnacles at 11:20 AM on March 9, 2009

ALD looks interesting, but I'm looking mostly for peer-reviewed research. Subscription wouldn't be a major problem for me because of my university affiliation, but you're right that it would pose a problem for larger audiences.
posted by The White Hat at 11:34 AM on March 9, 2009

There's Faculty of 1000. It's focused on biology and medicine, but that's still pretty broad, and there are multiple sub-disciplines. All the articles are peer-reviewed.
posted by Humanzee at 12:11 PM on March 9, 2009

Don't know what your field is, but Academic Hacker News is a new site that links to mostly Computer Science/Software Engineering papers (also has links to other sites that link to/discuss articles).
posted by MrSomeone at 1:36 PM on March 9, 2009

For browsing medical journal articles, nothing beats PubMed. Lots of great online science journals are available here.
posted by aquafortis at 2:04 PM on March 9, 2009

You could browse the TOC of some review journals. Like Nutrition Reviews.

Or subscribe to Science or Nature.
posted by tiburon at 9:09 PM on March 9, 2009

Thanks for the suggestions, folks. From the sound of it, no such thing exists in precisely the form I'd hoped-- and certainly nothing for free. I'm going to talk to some of my web guru friends to see how difficult creating something like that would be. Maybe some sort of RSS aggregator of scholarly blogs that filters links for academic/library TLDs or PDFs. This is way backburner right now, so if anyone can do it before next year, have at it.
posted by The White Hat at 7:42 AM on March 10, 2009