Show HN: Open Review – Scientific peer review is broken. We want to fix it

news.researchgate.net

8 points·peterjmag··5 comments

For those of you who want to jump right in and see some actual results:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259984904_Stimulus-...

And a bit more information about the feature itself:

https://www.researchgate.net/publicliterature.OpenReviewInfo...

I'm a front-end engineer / designer at ResearchGate, and we've been working our butts off to get this out. I really think this could turn the scientific community and the peer review system on its head.

Of course, I'd love to hear your feedback!

Actually, I'd like to see what happens when you apply Google's antispam measures to research papers. There are some researchers who constantly reference one another, like a link farm, in order to boost their credentials.

Maybe it would help reduce the incidence of citation cartels, but the other issue is that some fields are very small -- especially in highly technical fields like math and in some sub-fields of biology. In those cases, papers that are cited have to be cited because they're the only ones relevant to the research area.

If only it were that simple. PageRank is no panacea and not all cross-citations are incestuous, as you seem to be implying.

No they do not imply wrong doing. There are a lot of good reasons why cross citation occurs. Having an alternate score gives you another sense of what kind of work this person is doing. You have to remember - using cross citation to inflate rankings have a social cost as well. It prevents other more promising research from gaining the right attention.

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