Critique of papers and preprints

[ajb]

I don't see many critiques of published papers or preprints on this forum. I was wondering if a separate category (maybe several as subcategories of physics, chemistry, mathematics etc) would be of interest to the users of this forum?

 

My thought being it could potentially up the quality and level of the posts.

 

Though, reading and analysing papers is hard work. It may not get much further than listing the papers and presenting the abstracts.

 

What to others think about this? Are such threads inline with the forums aims and objectives?

 

Cheers

[CaptainPanic]

I can definitely see the benefit of a subforum for papers. Both for the forum in general, and for its individual members.

 

Whether it will be popular depends on the members here. Personally, I don't like reading scientific papers (the language used in those papers is just a pain - sentences of half a page and words that I don't know)...

 

How do you propose to deal with the following points:

1. Papers are often not free.

2. The claims made in a paper are often not listed clearly, so discussions might not have a clear topic.

3. Avoid people who will just advertise their personal research with no interest in taking part in the discussion itself (scientific spam).

[Mokele]

1. Papers are often not free.

 

Plenty are. The top-tier journal in my field releases all papers, absolutely free, after 6 months. Many other journals do similarly.

 

2. The claims made in a paper are often not listed clearly, so discussions might not have a clear topic.

 

That's actually good, as the quality of scientific writing is a valid topic, and it's a way to get people to learn to be clear.

 

3. Avoid people who will just advertise their personal research with no interest in taking part in the discussion itself (scientific spam).

 

I've actually never been in a paper discussion group that *doesn't* turn into "pick apart every flaw in this paper". Given that, it's hard to see anyone wanting to 'advertise'.

 

 

 

I've considered suggesting this before, but I don't have the time to run it right now, and I'm not sure of the interest level.

[timo]

I think that's an idea that's only good at first glance - I'll gladly be proven wrong, though. I don't even have the time to read all the papers I'm interested in from my field alone. Let's face it: I don't even understand all of them. So I somewhat doubt that you'll find many (or any) papers for which you find 2+ people interested in and capable of understanding.

 

The idea of presenting a paper for discussion might be interesting in the lines of experts presenting some work to a laymen (not necessarily meaning non-scientist but people from other or even fields) and being able to answer questions.

 

Anyways, why not simply propose a paper for discussion, ask if someone is interested and to what extent they understood it and see if whatever sort of discussion arises. Apart from some time there seems to be nothing to lose, and you don't need a seperate forum for it (and you can also link the thread from here so that it doesn't vanish in the specialized sub-forums that interested people possibly don't look into).

[ajb]

So I somewhat doubt that you'll find many (or any) papers for which you find 2+ people interested in and capable of understanding.

 

 

For now I am just "thinking out loud". I will have a think about possible papers, but your comment above I expect to be true.

[jimmydasaint]

I think the idea of a sub forum is excellent. This would be a sort of journal club beloved of team leaders to force post-docs, PhD's and undergraduates to be introduced to the rigour of critical evaluation of papers - an essential skill. However, I would propose that the sub forum is like the Science News section where separate papers are presented for critique.

 

However, there should be some direction, e.g. by specialists, otherwise the sub forum will 'die' from a lack of contributions. Actual critique of a paper is a long process if it is to be done properly. It took me days to prepare a critique of the first paper I was given pre-publication. I had to double check the information using books; much easier with the Internet though... I suggest that we should consider papers that are general enough to be understood by most people though, for example papers referring to global warming or latest findings in palaeontology.

[Mr Skeptic]

While I'm not sure I would be personally interested in most of them, if your idea is successfully implemented it would be very good for the forum. If we could attract some of the sort of people who critique papers...

 

Also, are there critiques of papers freely available on the internet? I don't think I've seen one though I haven't looked for one.