Hacker News Reader

I’ve long wanted some sort of platform for reading somewhat simplified, summarized research papers on topics of interested. Something a little simpler than an original paper, but more accurate and in-depth than what you might find in a popular news article.

I haven’t found anything loke that yet, and I don’t know if it would be feasible to crowdsource summarized publications. AI summarization isn’t quite good enough yet.

Something like Science News?

I would recommend “news and views” from nature or review articles in general for a broad summary of a field.

The Conversation[0] tries this. It aims more for 'accurate news stories written by/with academics' than 'simplified research papers' but definitely is trying to be credible yet accessible.

Sadly I've never written for them, as they've not got a huge audience and the career incentives in academia aren't really set up for this kind of accessible popularisation.

[0]: https://www.theconversation.com

If you're ok with videos, Two Minute Papers[1] is a great one for AI papers

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbfYPyITQ-7l4upoX8nvctg

I like this idea. When doing a literature review I make summary notes of the paper which I store with it. I use zotero for this which has an add-in (zotfile) that allows me to extract highlights and annotations I make in the pdf to separate notes; this is super handy. So, if those summary notes were somehow made public and organized and if many people did this, they would be a nice source of paper summaries from several perspectives.

> Likewise, "peer review" typically just means that 3 academics read the article and thought it was interesting and worth publishing.

They go a bit more in depth than that. They try to ensure there is no hole in the state of art, that may have an impact on your result, and that your methodology is sound.

> They go a bit more in depth than that. They try to ensure there is no hole in the state of art, that may have an impact on your result, and that your methodology is sound.

Of course, yes. The reviewers will give critical comments and may even recommend "revise and resubmit" for the authors to make changes to the article.

But the reviewers aren't going to run their own experiments and try to replicate the results, for example.

> To academicians, the journals are more like "interesting lines of research" rather than "settled results".

That may be true around the water cooler. Try publishing any result that goes against a peer-reviewed paper (and, as an author, not be an affilieated with a well-known US university) and you quickly realize that published results are pretty much settled in stone.

I'm not talking about ground-breaking stuff. Something on the level of "after lots of careful work in our group we were unable to replicate the results published in the relatively well-cited paper in a very niche topic" is largely unpublishable.

It appears that you're complaining about what gets accepted and what gets rejected for publication to academic journals, which can be a legitimate complaint. The journals are inevitably subject to a form of academic "trendiness" (for lack of a better word).

But that issue is not quite the same as how academics treat journal articles in general. The journals are not a full or fully accurate representation of academia or science as a whole.

It's easier to publish a result that contradicts a previous result but is different, like we measures X=20 but the previous paper said that X=10.

Publishing a negative result is very difficult. I guess you need a long history of good publications to convince the journal you are not making a silly mistake.

Yes and no. They're "interesting lines of research" except when they're in your field, then they're foundations or anchor points for your work, past, present, and future.

I'm not going to disagree that a lot gets lost in translation between academic article and the lay-person who hears a story on the nightly news, but I don't think gatekeeping academic research is the answer, but rather more emphasis on critical thinking and critical reading.

> I don't think gatekeeping academic research is the answer

Not sure what you mean by this? The journals are inherently gatekeeping academic research via peer review. But the suggestion isn't that the journals be locked away, merely that journals are not a great way for the public to interact with academia. Many academicians do write for the public and are eager to do so, but in different forms than journal articles.

I guess it depend on the area, but (for me, in my area) published results are just a stating point.

When reading a paper the first question are: Does it even makes sense? (mostly yes, it depends on the journal) Is it overhyped? (definitively yes) Is it interesting after removing the overhype? (sometimes yes) Can we reproduce the result with our tools? (I hope so) Can we combine the result with our previous results? (I hope so) Is the combination interesting? (I hope so) Interesting enough to assign it to a graduate student, to drop whatever we are doing or something in between? (mostly something in between)

If we try to reproduce the result and fail miserably or if the methods are too unclear, we will jut forget about the paper and work in another topic. Perhaps contact the authors if we know them or the result very promising.

I think we never take a result at face value, except perhaps for the list of citations that appear in the introduction about recent related work.