Comments on: CiteULike Ranking System

By: Matthieu

Matthieu — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 19:46:47 +0000

and what about a number-of-visits ranking system ? It will have some other kinds of bias, of course, but it will easily point out the “hottest” paper (in opposition to “the best”), as initially intended.

oh and “if we look good” looks a bit strange. maybe “if we look carefully” ? I hope it helps.

By: Le Doc'

Le Doc' — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 18:47:10 +0000

Well, trains are made for moving from a point A to a point B, not writing in English, I assume :) Thank you, anyway.

While talking about neighborhood in CiteULike, here is a site that could be of interest : CiteULike neighbors (just fill-in your username).

Richard Cameron came up with a whole bunch of new ideas, mostly about the best way to score papers filled under different categories. The concept seems promising :

A paper filled under Bio -> Cell Biol, with 20 hits, and under Bio -> Physio with 3 hits, will obtain a score of 23 hits in bio, plus its respective scores in each category. And as you can see, the subdivision, asked by a great majority of members, is in progress.

It could be more informative than just a tag-related voting, mainly because a tag like 2beta (one of mines, actually mhc-related) is less likely to be shared among a lot of people than evolution (maybe the most used tag in citeulike).

The best I kept for the end. The actual value of a vote is now depending of its age. To avoid, of course, that citation classics blocks the first place. Each vote has now an half-life of a few days. So, the votelist is more likely to become a v-hotlist (this one is so poor).

The social software inspiration is maybe due to the fact that R Cameron is fond of them, and tries to apply them to his baby. Anyway, with a few tricks, I think the two ideas are not incompatible/irrelevant.

By: Enro

Enro — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 18:11:47 +0000

As you mentioned, the purpose of social tools e.g. CiteULike is perhaps more to enable “collective intelligence” through the magic of actions of millions of individuals and to connect/track related papers, tags and so on than to ask each of us to vote for his/her favorite paper — which is exactly the reason why I prefer del.icio.us and its hotlist to Digg and Digg-like websites! In CiteULike, I like to watch tags or people I’m interested in rather than having the pseudo-voting-buzz stuff. On the other hand, if I want hot papers with comments and discussions, I’d rather look into blogs and specialized tools like Postgenomic (for instance, Postgenomic’s literature agregator http://www.postgenomic.com/papers.php ).

P.S. A few mistakes I have noticed: - “arXive” instead of “arXiv” (and what about an hyperlink?) - “if the vote involve” instead of “if the vote involves” - “to classify him” instead of “to classify it” - “hotest” instead of “hottest” - “functionnal” instead of “functional”