Depth-First: The Quiet Revolution in Scientific Peer-Review: An Introduction to Research Blogging

The Quiet Revolution in Scientific Peer-Review: An Introduction to Research Blogging

Rich Apodaca — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:37:00 -0500

A quiet revolution is taking place in the way the primary research literature gets reviewed. Like all revolutions in their infancy, this one looks hungry, raggedy and generally not respectable. But that could change rather quickly given the right technology.

Research Blogging is a brand new service that aggregates commentary about the peer-reviewed literature appearing on blogs.

Let's say Mary the Chemist finds a procedure in a paper on reductive amination that solves a problem she's been having in isolating her products. After having used the procedure awhile, she notices that one class of substrate not described in the original paper gives much lower yields than those reported. Not having the resources to create a complete paper around her observation, she decides to write about what she found and post it to her blog.

If that were the end of the story, it's very unlikely Mary's posting would be of much use. Although Mary's blog is read by a couple of hundred people daily, few of the readers on the day her posting appeared had an interest in reductive amination or the paper she discussed. And none of her readers on that day were able to follow up on her observation.

Mary continues to post to her blog and eventually her observation, of potentially great value to the right chemist, gets buried in the archives (and on page 3 or 4 of most Google searches).

Enter Research Blogging, a Web-based database associating blog entries with references to the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Some time before writing about her observations, Mary signed up for a Research Blogging account and registered her blog with the service. At the time she wrote her observations on the reductive amination reaction, Mary applied special markup to the posting to make it readable by Research Blogging's automated system.

Instead of disappearing into the digital abyss, Mary's observation becomes permanently associated with the original paper.

Although Research Blogging's user interface is currently primitive, it's unlikely to remain so for long. The founders of the service appear both motivated and committed, recently forming a non-profit corporation to support their work.

In the future it's not inconceivable that Barry the Chemist, after having finished doing his CAS search on reductive amination methods would next turn to Research Blogging to make sure he really knows everything written about the three most promising peer-reviewed papers he's considering using.

Research Blogging is a wonderful idea with great potential to fill a significant need. Like any new technology, though, there are some issues to work out. The next article in this series will offer some ideas.

"The Quiet Revolution in Scientific Peer-Review: An Introduction to Research Blogging" by Duncan Hull

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 05:11:29 -0500

It would be nice of google's link:feature worked like it should do but it is notoriously dodgy, for example, link:depth-first.com comes up with some strange results, you have to be a fully paid up member of the Church of Googleology to understand that one.

"The Quiet Revolution in Scientific Peer-Review: An Introduction to Research Blogging" by Rich Apodaca

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:09:15 -0500

Duncan, I'm surprised that something like:

link:http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja00214a053

doesn't seem to work with Google.

Noel and Geoff, I agree that if the process can be made less laborious, it should. Imagine if Google required you to add special markup to get your documents indexed...

"The Quiet Revolution in Scientific Peer-Review: An Introduction to Research Blogging" by Geoffrey Hutchison

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 13:15:20 -0500

I actually talked about this recently on MacResearch.org -- the article was "Crossing the Lines."

There seem to be several existing sources for searching blog articles referring to a DOI. I'm sure these will continue to improve as more interest is drawn to scientific blogging.

But I agree with Noel above -- PG and CB have the lowest possible barrier. Once a blog is added to the system, you get all sorts of useful data.

"The Quiet Revolution in Scientific Peer-Review: An Introduction to Research Blogging" by baoilleach

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 04:11:55 -0500

I tend to think that anything that requires special markup is, well, not going to be widely used. I have to force myself to add markup for links as it is. What's much easier are tags, and these could be used to flag a blog post as a whole. Although the barrier to adoption would be much lower, it seems that most techy people just want the 'best possible system' regardless of whether people are likely to use it.

PG and CB have the lowest barrier of all...none. Although the blog itself needs to have been submitted or added to the system.

"The Quiet Revolution in Scientific Peer-Review: An Introduction to Research Blogging" by Duncan Hull

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 03:52:19 -0500

I agree, there are no good solutions at the moment. But I think the idea of postgenomic markup is a good one, though not that widely adopted much like hReview microformat. Then there are trackbacks and friends too...

Alternatively, you can google the DOI, which is very clumsy (and relies on the page exposing the DOI), but it sometimes works. There must be other options too, but none spring to my at the moment.

"The Quiet Revolution in Scientific Peer-Review: An Introduction to Research Blogging" by Rich Apodaca

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 22:46:59 -0500

Duncan and Geoff, thanks for the links.

From what I can tell, what distinguishes Research Blogging from other tools are:

its focus on the problem of linking blogs to the peer-review literature; and
the fact that it's an application (mostly) ready for use by end users.

Postgenomic (and by extension Chemical Blogspace) does a lot of things, one of which is the linking of blogs to the peer-reviewed literature. But it doesn't focus on the problem.

For example, how would I find all of the blog posts discussing an article with a given DOI? How would I find a list of all DOIs appearing in a blog (or individual post)? What about archival of links to blog posts and DOIs? What about assigning relevance to a link?

To be fair, Research Blogging doesn't really do a lot of this yet either. But the team does seem to be focussed on this particular problem, so it should be interesting to watch.

What other services are there?

"The Quiet Revolution in Scientific Peer-Review: An Introduction to Research Blogging" by Geoffrey Hutchison

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 20:06:18 -0500

Rich,

I'll second Duncan's comments. There are some great long-standing utilities in chemistry-specific areas too. For example, Noel O'Boyle introduced Firefox "Greasemonkey" scripts for annotating articles from Chemical Blogspace

Noel's blog gives more details on his framework for a commenting service and you can get the scripts from BlueObelisk.org and UserScripts.org.

Noel also pointed out Journalfire which looks similar.

Is Research Blogging just another new service (which would be great), or does it bring something unique to the pile?

"The Quiet Revolution in Scientific Peer-Review: An Introduction to Research Blogging" by Duncan Hull

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 12:28:51 -0500

Hi Rich, there are lots of interesting tools that do this kind of thing, uniting blogging conversations with the original research material and its scientific discussion. See bloggers talk to scientists and finding conversations around academic publications for further details.