

Academia.edu Launches A Directory Of 12,500 Academic Journals - ryanf
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/24/academia-edu-launches-a-directory-of-12500-academic-journals/

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_delirium
So far, without having used either one extensively, I'm finding Mendeley's
"related papers" approach, which seems to be based on a mixture of the social
graph and NLP, a bit more useful.

At least in my area, journals aren't things you "browse" anymore, because the
big journals have very disparate sub-fields represented in them, most of which
I don't regularly keep up on. They're closer to repositories where papers get
filed away. The sub-field I care about publishes regularly in 5-6
journals/conferences, and somewhat less regularly in another 15-20 or so, so
what I really want is the non-existent _Journal of the Stuff I Research_ ,
whose centroid is my own research. In reality, that journal is scattered
across a bunch of other publications, but Mendeley makes some effort to
reconstruct it for me.

Just following something super-broad like _Science_ or _Artificial
Intelligence_ , though, isn't as useful to me, because the vast majority of
papers just aren't going to be relevant to my research.

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cing
Does Mendeley allow you to follow the publications of researchers on a paper-
by-paper basis like this simple app myPeers (<http://codingseed.com/>) or is
it mainly for recommendation of papers based on matching key words?

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IanMulvany
I'm VP for new product for Mendeley. We don't have the ability to follow a
specific author, yet. This is something we are working towards, and will hope
to have available in an upcoming release.

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darwinGod
In today's age,where Google news aggregates and clusters similar news, and
where blog articles with dubious content, but strong twitter-networks, can
virally disseminate information, for how long can research publications take a
maintain a -40-USD-per-paper approach? I ,for one, am totally for academia.edu
breaks this barrier down in the future.Curious as to what other HN'ers feel.

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marciovm123
I think efforts like these are patches for a soon-to-be obsolete system.

Science publishing needs to look less like Gutenberg and more like Quora - way
faster turnaround and less susceptible to corruption amongst overly powerful
editorial committees.

Social graph APIs have solved the identity & attribution problems that
prevented blogs from filling this niche (no tenure committee cares about your
blog's pageviews because they are hard to assess), so we should be seeing
meaningful competition soon.

I'm working on an open-source project in this space with a focus on medicine -
contact me if you're interested!

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snewe
Publication lags -- sometimes 3-4 years in economics/finance -- make the news
feed they built less useful. If instead they built the feed around
<http://ssrn.com> or <http://ideas.repec.org>, it could have value for fields
where publication occurs after a paper has its impact.

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darwinGod
Really?? Wow!!! So someone could have a paper published next year, about the
scale of the "potential recession" in 2009. Really sad.

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emeltzer
Seeing sites that aim to serve the research community (pubget comes also to
mind) begin to pop up is very exciting. that said, I think the social graph
component is useful as a way to inform what papers the site shows you, but
should not be explicitly implemented in this Facebook-ish way. Seriously, I do
not want to friend my PI.

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cing
Yeah, this seems like a necessary building block for an academic social
network, but an index of journals isn't very exciting by itself. I already
have RSS subscriptions to the journals that have high impact in my field and I
won't be looking for new journals with this "browse" feature.

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zby
By the way, in the area of philosophy we ( <http://philpapers.org/> ) cover
much more ground - with crawling not only journal sites, but also personal web
pages of researchers, books etc. We have also some automatic classification
tool (into a very detailed taxonomy system:
<http://philpapers.org/categories.pl>), discussion forums, tools for
monitoring research (like following your favourite researchers, or articles
published by your Facebook friends) and other cool stuff - and the system is
Open Source: <https://github.com/xPapers/xPapers> (this is still a very early
release).

