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Comment by edtechdev | Hacker News Reader

Here's hoping open, post-publication review catches on:

http://futureofscipub.wordpress.com/open-post-publication-pe... http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.338... http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/brian-deers-...

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In academia, articles already have a form of post-publication review: citation count. If you don't do good work, you won't get any citations, though the converse isn't always true.

Professors usually ask their grad students to read the most important and influential papers in the field. When those grad students then turn around and start composing papers of their own, they'll refer to the ones they read, creating a kind of circular feedback cycle. Thus, if you want to find a field's best work, it often suffices to look for highly cited papers first.

It's like Reddit's karma voting system, just a lot slower. :)

>If you don't do good work, you won't get any citations

A lot of terrible, and even retracted papers have a high citation count, though.

Sure, just like how a lot of terrible and uninteresting articles on Reddit have a high karma count. By and large, both systems do a fairly good job at sorting out the interesting from the uninteresting, though there are always mistakes

True, but citations are qualitative as well as quantitative, so at least researchers should know that Controversial Paper X mostly gets citations as an example of "unusual findings, possibly due to methodological shortcomings" if they are deciding where it's worth summarising in the literature review section of their paper. And arguably (especially in social sciences) papers which provoke interesting rebuttals them are deservedly more influential than papers which are esoteric, trivial or dull.

If grad students are reading the most important and influential papers in the field then they're certainly not going to read the just published paper that tells everyone how to exploit magitech energy for great win - or whatever - because it's not important or influential yet.

All that process should do is reinforce the status-qua.

Post-publication peer review is already catching on, for example on Epistemio - http://www.epistemio.com.

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