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SciCombinator - scientific news aggregator and discussion

bitwise.r12.railsrumble.com

91 pointsanu_gupta29 comments

It's great to see something like this that doesn't just rip off HN, (old) Digg or Reddit's design. A very fresh design. Given the scope of "science" though, I suspect some way of filtering it would become a priority.

Loving the "about" page too. Great to see all of the different tech being used. I hope other entries take a page out of this book (disclaimer: I'm a RR judge.)

I actually wish more people would rip off designs, instead of trying to look different for its own sake. It would lead to much more uniformity, and when people do make a new design for the sake of a new design (as apposed to differentiating their site), it will stand out more.

Having said that, I also like the design of the page, however, the solid white background comes across as a little bit to strong. After a few minute hacking around with the background, #ECF2F5 seems to make the site a lot easier on the eyes.

I'm not a big fan of the design. I prefer the "minimalist" design of HN. But still, nice website.

Thanks for the kind comments Peter.

Yeah, filtering was one of the things we had planned but we just ran out of time to do it properly. Once the judging is over we'll take a look at it.

Thanks for the kind words Peter.

Looks great, just one comment: please don't use Disqus (or any other 3rd party service) for comments, they suck.

Awesome project/website. The one thing I'm not terribly thrilled about is the infinite scroll--it's nice to have coherent page 1, page 2, etc so that you don't have to worry about scrolling down, clicking through a link, and then coming back to just the top page.

unfortunately it's just pubmed ... so it's a life sciences and biomed aggregator :( Not a science aggregator.

I was excited until I tried to submit an article and it asked me for the Pubmed ID. Science is bigger than Pubmed damnit. Titles mistleading :( Nice site though. Can't argue with that.

Nice name, great idea. I hope this takes off.

I notice that the ranking mechanism is automatic according to the altmetric score. Are you planning on integrating HN style upvoting, and potentially alternate filtered lists for most upvoted (similar to HN's front page)? I suppose the problem with that is that scientific publishing moves at a much slower pace than the sort of content HN deals in.

Thanks for the comments. :)

Yep, the ranking mechanism is based mostly off of altmetrics, but we also modify the score based on the number of clicks through to the article, or the discuss* page and the age of the article (similar to the HN decay algorithm), plus a few other things.

* so this sort of does the upvote thing, but in a more subtle way - having the filtered list sounds like a great idea though!

I'd love to be able to filter articles behind a paywall. It'd probably be a good way to make people sign up for the sign, too.

The font isn't rendered well in FF 16. Other than that, it's a pretty interesting project.

Thanks for the heads up; I'm sure that there will be plenty of little things pop up now we have finalized the entry. We'll take a look at it once the judging is over.

The site looks neat, but it's a bit hard to read here since the text is wider than the window for most window widths (Chrome 22.0.1229.79, Kubuntu 12.04, 125% zoom - it fits at 100% but that's too small for my eyes).

Given the name, I thought this was going to be some kind of new private science funding source. Got my hopes up for a second. Cool idea, though, and I love the design. This thing definitely needs "subreddits" for different fields.

subreddits or filtering are a must, and I don't know what a pubmed score is - is it more technically challenging to handle arbitrary doi.dx URLs? How about support for ArXiv?

If the difficulty is gaining ranking for things, then I guess you just need more users and a way to handle upvotes - let me know if you want me to advertise it to all my grad student friends with institution subscriptions inside all these paywalls. You'll have to support physics articles before they'll care, of course...

I've been seeing a lot of sites lately that I like more on mobile than desktop - this is one of them. I consider that to be a good thing BTW.

Bonus points for a nice, mobile optimized, interface. Great site, thanks for sharing.

Cheers. Using boostrap's grid for layout meant that we got it (mostly) for free.

How on earth do the submissions have that score?

It's the Altmetric score I think.

https://altmetric.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/83337...

Based on number of tweets, blog posts, news stories etc.

That’s right. We also apply a HN style decay to the scores, along with a boost for open content.

Great idea! I love it!

Cheers mate.

Is this your site? Please trim the blurbs to complete sentences. It is so frustrating to have so many sentences cut off in

You can expand the abstract by clicking on the ... at the end of the text.

Yes, but it makes sense to put the ellipsis at a sentence end whenever possible.

The issue was that we wanted to limit the abstract to two lines on the homepage. Limiting to one sentence meant that long sentences were taking up more than that. So, we truncated based on word count.

We could have done something more complicated with checking sentence length and then truncating etc. But, the Rumble is time limited & it wasn’t a priority.

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