
Ask HN: Is there a Hacker News equivalent for research papers? - haylem
The title sums it up. Basically, I&#x27;d like to know if there&#x27;s a similar community or format to see the latest most popular research papers, published in free and open access?<p>Obviously we get a lot of these here already. But I&#x27;d be looking at something with a wider reach and encompassing more fields. Or separate communities for each field, as otherwise there&#x27;d be a skew in the favor of the biggest communities (as we get here for some languages for instance... but I digress).<p>I know HN is not always necessarily about &quot;latest&quot; or &quot;current&quot; content either, but you get the idea.<p>(Tricks to extract most popular articles from HN, Google Scholar or others are also welcome, of course ;))<p>Update: title fix, didn&#x27;t know the etiquette.
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qwrusz
This is a great question. Sorry in advance I don't know of one. But it is
something I think about often. I tend to read math and economics research
papers (have PhD in the latter too if it matters) and have published.

I think there are 3 issues here:

1) there is so much research coming out. Even working paper releases. Its hard
to keep up with that volume of work. How to control that flow of work?

2) Research has become very niche. So there are research papers that only 5
people can understand and only 2 of those people even care about. This
specificity "problem" is a reality of the sciences but it makes HN type voting
system a challenge. An upvoting system is OK for news articles and technical
papers that had a wide audience in mind, but for many research papers it can
skew the results people see to particular types of "easy" research which are
not always very good or rigorous or current.

3) This is the big one I think: We really need a go-to site for anonymous
comments on research papers in academia and from other experts working in
industry. HN is a great example of the power of such an "anonymous experts
option" which I think overall works well here. Sure there are the occasional
"troll" comments or the "I googled this topic I never of 5 minutes ago then
commented" type comments but in general quality anonymous comments do rise to
the top very often on here and I learn more from comments than articles in
many cases. I think with research papers, while people are not afraid to
attack or be polemical per se, but they do hold back on a lot more they want
to say if not anonymous. It's very easy to be a critic in public, but offering
an alternative solutions or idea in public can cause problems career-wise and
for other reasons.

P.S. As for tricks, I think the usual google advanced search tricks and other
boolean gimmicks work quite well (date ranges, "-" to exclude shit,
wildcards).

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llccbb
I am currently working on point 3. Don't have any experience in community
building, but really excited at the topic and scope of the project.

I have been thinking about the relative merits of anonymous posting vs
identity-tagged. On the one hand are the suggestions you make that people may
be hesitant to critique or applaud ideas because of political backlash. This
would favor an anonymous system. On the other hand, I want to know what
certain figures think. There is weight behind what a member of the National
Academy thinks, and if they are weighing in, then I am going to pay more
attention to those statements than some anonymous poster's.

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sathley
[http://www.arxiv-sanity.com](http://www.arxiv-sanity.com)

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raleighm
[https://www.bibsonomy.org/](https://www.bibsonomy.org/)

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turnersr
Depending on your interests you might like:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/REMath/](https://www.reddit.com/r/REMath/)

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csa
Academia.edu is a company that is trying to take the lead in this space. I
wouldn't call HN-like, but it is at least a place that aims for academic
discourse.

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Dowwie
Yes, there is and you're using it. The HN community and/or moderators choose
not to upvote.

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ikeboy
Reddit.com/r/science ?

~~~
haylem
That'd be a good example of a similar community I guess, ~but my other
requirement was focus on research papers, not discussions.~

Worth digging into though, thanks.

Update: Actually is apparently focused on papers. Thanks!

I want something more like "most popular papers across any field" ("science",
while broad, seems already somewhat focused).

It's just always fun to discover stuff that may be unrelated to what you do or
know.

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Supraliminal
I'm working on wikipaper.org

