by physicsgraph on 12/19/21, 4:10 AM with 17 comments
by Strilanc on 12/19/21, 4:18 PM
For example, looking over my own papers for examples, a one page note [1] got more scites than a paper I contributed to that introduced several techniques cumulatively dropping the projected cost of simulating a chemistry thing by more than a factor of a million [2]. That's a cherry picked example, the pattern isn't that consistent, but having seen what happened to news sites it still worries me.
...not that the incentives for how to structure and publish papers are that great to begin with.
[1]: https://scirate.com/arxiv/2106.11513 [2]: https://scirate.com/arxiv/1805.03662
by dricornelius on 12/19/21, 8:20 AM
by xioxox on 12/19/21, 10:50 AM
by da-bacon on 12/20/21, 4:25 AM
Amusingly it was even more useful to me after I left academia. Scirate’s community is almost entirely theoretical quantum computing, and so I was able to keep up with the field by looking every three months or so at the top papers.
As noted in other comments, the end point of vanity voting isn't great. It's not great at discovery, but I have found papers there I would never have read. But because it is a small community it actually does a good job in quantifying what the community feels is important. I suspect if scirate was ever more widely used it would be less useful.
Another interesting phenomenon is that no one ever precisely defined what voting meant. Some people think of it as endorsing. Others as bookmarking. Not sure what impact this has, but sometimes if you score your own paper people will growl at you.
by viewfromafar on 12/19/21, 7:24 AM
In general, it could be appealing to have an open, established process for gathering public feedback on articles. It seems a scientific community would rather have their own version set up, where they could also curate content (rather than browse by category).
by Royi on 12/19/21, 4:35 PM