Making research papers easier for people to understand. What do you think?

3 points by rp2684 7 years ago | 1 comment

So we all know how painful it can be to understand research papers. So I was thinking of creating this tool that allows people who have read a research paper to connect with each other. So potentially, all the readers who have read “paper A” can connect with each other and its author (maybe).

The connection would allow one to post questions about the paper, and the question would then go to everyone who had previously interacted with this community (people who have read this paper before). Past question and answers are saved to benefit new readers.

This way, we can benefit readers by giving them more clarity on the subject. And we can benefit authors by giving them insights into how their paper was received by the community.

There are many problems with this model - like why would anyone apart from the author answer etc... but the general idea is above.

What do you awesome people think about this?? Any comments will be appreciated.

blastbeat 7 years ago |

I like the idea. But speaking as a research mathematician, I cannot imagine that such a system will can be adopted in the math communities. You have quite a lot challenges to solve in this domain:

1. Only very few people actually read a certain paper. Of course it depends, but usually papers are only interesting for a handful of mathematicians world wide.

2. The access to papers is not centralized or can be controlled. You cannot know who read which paper. Often preprints are circulating via email. Published papers may be behind a pay wall.

3. How do you want to detect whether somebody really read a paper, let alone understand it?

4. Surprisingly many mathematicians are eccentric and hostile against computers (and programming). E.g. older people refuse to use new tools like LaTex and prefer TeX. I only know a few mathematicians, who use git/hg to make collaborative writing easier. Usually people emails documents back und forth instead. Cannot imagine, that a critical mass of mathematicians starts logging into some fancy new app. I also suspect that many people don't want to be tracked for what they read. After all, research is competitive.

Cannot speak about other research communities though.