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Comment by ekm2 | Hacker News Reader

We need to have HN for academic research papers:Karma counts as the citation index,or something similar.

I see a bigger problem: the fact that things like citation counts are being used as a metric. We should be judging researchers by whether or not they are solving problems (or if they are helping other researchers solve problems -- like developing new research tools and techniques, or publishing negative results that tell other researchers what to avoid). It makes no difference whether a paper is cited one time or a hundred times. It makes no difference if a research publishes one big paper or ten smaller papers. What matters is whether or not progress is being made.

But this avoids the central issue - how can we know if a paper helps people make progress on solving problems? Citation counts are just a proxy for exactly that - to move away from them you have to come up with a better proxy or evaluation method.

In the UK universities' research output are assessed by HEFCE using the "Research Excellence Framework" (which replaced the Research Assessment Exercise) [1]. Sadly, it suffers the same problem of being another metric [2]. It's a time sink for academics and it fosters a cutthroat atmosphere in the run-up. I heard some unconfirmed rumours that academics not submitting case studies to the REF will have their contracts re-assessed.

I think this exposes the bigger problem of metrics in general. It's hard to determine how much impact research has, particularly in the short term. I'd be interested to see what the outcome of the REF is, but I remain sceptical and apathetic towards it, as does everyone else I've spoken to.

[1] : http://www.ref.ac.uk/

[2] : I get the impression it does anyway - I'm not involved in it this round.

Conferences are a good starting point: researchers meet each other, share work, judge others' work, and discuss research. I am not saying it is a complete solution, just that citation counts are a terrible solution that encourage the wrong things (and that we need something better).

I agree with you that using citation counts as a metric is flawed.But I was primarily suggesting that we need "HN for science research papers ",not a particular way that it should be implemented.

I completely agree with this. Only if there was a way to translate this into politics (e.g. not just the popularity should decide where we are going).

This happened a few years ago (~2008?). HNA (HN Academic) was launched and didn't get a lot of traffic. Reading papers just takes a lot of time.

There might be other models that work (other people mention Medley). The attention span for an HN clone is too short though.

Interestingly, Mendeley [1] tried to be (one of many) social platform with the specific aim to find more easily relevant papers for you. Unfortuantely, (or fortuantely for the founders?) it was bought recently by Elsevier, so I'm curious to see what will happen to it. Finding good relevant papers is still a difficult task imo.

[1] http://www.mendeley.com/

A big problem with this is that academics tend to avoid social networking platforms like the plague.

You need to find a way to prevent people from hacking it. Google page rank is similar, and people were motivated to hack it

Good != Popular

There would be an insanely high correlation between school prestige and karma though :\

I've never noticed a correlation between school prestige and paper citation in my field, of course that doesn't mean there isn't one. I'm curious if you have anything to back up this statement or if its just anecdotal?

I've come across quite a bit of anecdotal evidence as blog posts (Damn it, can't find the links now) and scientists will often confess to being biased about prestige while reading articles. It's also probably the reason why mathematical papers do not print author affiliations at the front of the paper (they are listed at the back).

It's simply a matter of choosing where to invest your scarce time. A paper from prestigious authors/affiliation presumably has a better chance of being worth your time. So such papers get more attention and hence more citations, even if they might not have been the most novel or the most comprehensive. The same also applies to papers in high impact factor journals where citations have some kind of a positive feedback loop.

It's just anecdotal, but it is a lot of anecdotes. Both of my parents are professors, one at a much more prestigious school than the other. I've worked for a regular publisher, an academic publisher and I went to graduate school myself, so I've had a chat about this exact situation many times, though I admit I have no hard data.

I want to work on a website for all sorts of publishers, invite / interview process to post as to have no shitposting. Users will be able to register and set a monthly reading budget, which will be divided equally amongst all the authors you read in X time period.

I want this service to have an API so you can easily push content to other platforms like Tumblr, facebook, or your own personal website, housing all your content on my site.

I would use this. I believe in paying people for their hard work and I want the money to go directly into their pockets. No overhead.

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