

Annotatr - scientific paper commenting done right - mariuskempe
http://annotatr.appspot.com/

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mreid
Hi, I'm one of the developers of annotatr.

First of all, it's great to see people having a look at it and offering
encouragement and constructive feedback. Thanks.

Annotatr was more a proof of concept and fun hack than anything else. While
Bosco and I did want to offer an alternative to existing commenting systems
for scientific papers (Nature, PLoS, CiteULike, etc.) we also realised that a
big difficulty is getting continued engagement.

Some time after we put it up, I adapted annotatr and turned it into mldiscuss,
a site for commenting on papers from ICML 2010:

<http://mldiscuss.appspot.com/>

Before, during, and after the conference this site had quite a bit of activity
but has since died off. I guess the lesson here is that a narrow focus (a
single conference) works better than a broad one (scientific papers) -- at
least in the short term. I'll likely extend mldiscuss for this year's ICML to
see if it can pick up a bit more momentum.

~~~
mariuskempe
Thanks, that's good to know.

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chapmanb
The code is on GitHub: <https://github.com/mreid/annotatr>

I remember seeing it last year and it doesn't look to have been worked on
recently. A great proof of concept, but it'll be hard to sustain development
motivation: there aren't good opportunities for making money, and this type of
work unfortunately doesn't generate a lot of recognition amongst scientists.

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mariuskempe
I should clarify that I am only a user - the site was made by
<http://mark.reid.name> and <http://boscoh.com>

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bhickey
There's a persistent cross-site script vulnerability on the front page.

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rubidium
ah, not quite done right.

The search interface really needs to be more like google scholar or web of
knowledge (who really wants to type in "author:"einstein a" && year:1905").
Narrowing by field/discipline is a must, esp. for some keywords.

Also, just discussing abstracts is pretty lame. The typeface/links to citulike
and journal are too small. There's no info on how many times it was cited, or
what papers it cited.

Not to complain, but I'll wait for the next guy. This won't work.

~~~
crocowhile
Truth is, that even if this was the best interface in the world, scientists
would never spend their time discussing papers online.

Facultyof1000 tried hard, Plos is trying hard, even nature tried hard to get
people to leave comments to papers. It just doesn't work.

~~~
mariuskempe
Let's hope.

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davi
quick wishlist:

\- interactive refinement of results as I type

\- ability to restrict results to only papers that have been commented upon

\- ability to restrict visibility of my comments to friends/colleagues

\- ability to get notified if a particular abstract gets a threshold number of
comments

As it stands, this is not a minimum viable product I will return to (though
perhaps it would be if everyone else in my field used it). Nice try though,
hopefully it will improve with iteration.

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alextp
There are loads of duplicate papers. Searching, for example. for "latent
dirichlet allocation" shows the same JMLR paper about four times in the top
results.

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odiroot
Sorry guys, I gave you an exception while searching for Polish theses:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u0144' in position
14: ordinal not in range(128)

EDIT: Also, after navigating to:
<http://annotatr.appspot.com/citeulike/article/57175>, I've got:
DownloadError: ApplicationError: 5

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kenthorvath
This would work a lot better if there were social integration with your
friends and colleagues - maybe scraped from Facebook?

~~~
mariuskempe
Or if Academia.edu incorporated this feature, or had a login API...

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ComSubVie
There seems to be a small bug, when I try to search for an author with a
german umlaut in the name (for example "Kühn Eva") I get an error
("UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xfc' in position
9: ordinal not in range(128)"), however searching after "Kuhn Eva" works.

~~~
dmlorenzetti
Another small bug in how author names get scraped. It seems to have to do with
colons in paper titles. For example, the paper "Ontologies Are Us: A unified
model of social networks and semantics" (by Peter Mika) gets reported as
"Ontologies are Us:" (by Unified M. Of).

------
Groxx
Searching for nothing causes an error with stack trace:

<http://annotatr.appspot.com/search/all?q=>

