Voting system inappropriate
Santosh Patnaik
Monday, 02 July 2007 17:47 UTC
The voting system on Nature Precedings, wherein a user votes a ‘yes’ for an article, should be removed. Such voting is not appropriate — Nature Precedings is not a casual, unscholarly social site like Digg.com, and indicates nothing — the expertise of Nature Precedings users will almost always be limited to their areas of work.
Quality, and not popularity, of articles should be exposed (e.g., through an objective, multi-point rating system).
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Replies
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Precedings is designed as a space for what we are calling “informal” scholarly communication (where informal merely refers to that which is not published in a peer-reviewed journal and is somewhat different from “casual”). Your point about the need for a more quantitative ratings system is well taken and something we have been discussing for a while. The way we have designed it, the voting feature is currently a way for members to express interest in a paper without necessarily placing a quantitative judgment of quality on the paper.
An analogy might be to applause at a conference or after a talk. One may be applauding because of the eloquence of the speaker, the content presented, or just the amount of interest that the presentation generated. The more people who applaud, the more “popular” the presentation is. (I ignore the fact that people can vary the volume of their individual clapping, for which there is no analogy in Precedings.) Although this may not directly reflect the quality of the presentation, it does reflect something about it.
Currently, comments are the best way to express one’s thoughts about the quality of an article, and especially the metrics you mention in your earlier post (clarity, originality, novelty, etc). Comments allow the commenter to expand on why they thought the document was unclear, or crystal clear; original or unoriginal; etc. However, comments are not as easily quantified or summarized as ratings are.
I do want to emphasize, though, that your proposal for a ratings system is extremely well stated and thought provoking. We will certainly be looking into adding something along those lines in the future.
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