PubMed Commons

Don’t you wish there was a way to comment on papers?

Now there is. Thanks to the efforts of Rob Tibshirani, Pat Brown, Mike Eisen, David Lipman and others there is now a system called PubMed Commons.

PubMed is the central repository for biomedical research. PubMed Commons allows people to have active discussions of papers. A full description is available at Rob’s website here.

This is very good news. We need this. But there is more good news. Rob is working towards including all the major statistical and machine learning journals. Eventually there may even be some sort of link to arXiv. Note that there are discussion websites for arXiv, such as CosmoCoffee but I don’t know of one for statistics.

Congratulations to Rob and his colleagues on this new effort.

This entry was written by normaldeviate, posted on October 23, 2013 at 7:55 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

3 Comments

  1. deep mukherjee
    Posted October 23, 2013 at 8:31 pm | Permalink

    An excellent initiative that will control the type I and Type II error by providing transparency and will give quick assessments from experts using crowdsourcing facility.
    I strongly believe the “comment” and the “like” button will revolutionize the way (style + motivation) we approach writing papers.

    These functionalities could be more powerful for “unpublished” technical reports (@ arXiv ) compare to the “published” ones (Journals). Critical reviews could ultimately guide the future publication. In a sense, “readers” will play a vital role in this process.

  2. deep mukherjee
    Posted October 28, 2013 at 8:31 pm | Permalink

    This might give some real perspective:
    http://matt-welsh.blogspot.in/2013/07/does-academic-process-slow-innovation.html

  3. J M C
    Posted October 29, 2013 at 8:16 am | Permalink

    Hopefully the comments will be moderated or people will refrain from making gut-comments. Most of the websites (such as newspapers, blogs, youtube …) that allow comments tend to produce senseless discussions or badly-informed comments (including comments from people who didn’t read the article in question). This may produce misleading impressions of some papers. So, I really hope this idea works.

2 Trackbacks

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    […] wrong on this. Certainly plenty of smart people (like the folks who developed PubMed Commons, Larry Wasserman, and the folks at Retraction Watch) disagree with me and think that PubMed Commons will be a great […]

  2. By The Second Coming of Peer Review | Arthur Edelstein on October 28, 2013 at 2:55 pm

    […] bless the creators of PubMed Commons for this brilliant and daring […]