07.12.07
PLoS ONE Adds Five Star Ratings for Research Papers
A new feature has been added this week to the open access journal PLoS ONE, which was launched just last year. In addition to accepting comments and annotations on individual research articles, the journal is now allowing registered users to rate each paper in three categories: Insight, Reliability, and Style. The resulting average score (on a five star scale) is clearly visible to anyone reading the paper, and the rating box can be expanded to show ratings in each category, as well as the users that rated the paper and additional information about them. Additionally, those that leave ratings on papers can add a brief comment to the rating, which is meant to be shorter than a full annotation to a paper.
Thus far, PLoS ONE’s editors have not indicated if the ratings will be used as the basis for an aggregate list of, say, the top 10 rated articles published in the journal. As a new, online-only journal that has thus far been regarded as the dump station for rejected articles from the other PLoS journals, I see this feature getting little use — perhaps more than the annotation feature is currently used, but not enough to get any other major journals to hop on the trend.
Nonetheless, the journal’s staff is encouraging readers of PLoS ONE to “Never read a paper on PLoS ONE without leaving a rating!” We’ll wait and see if the readers will heed the encouragement. Link
“dump station for rejected articles from the other PLoS journals” seems a little harsh. Considerably less than half of the papers submitted to PLoS ONE have been submitted to other PLoS Journals before coming to PLoS ONE. The acceptance rate for ‘virgin’ submissions is no different than those that have been assessed elswhere first.
As far as lists go, of course we would like to compile these. We need the data to work on first though. Most likely we will start posting lists on the PLoS Blog before exposing the information on the site itself.
Really though the question shouldn’t be “will rating work” but “do I want rating to work?”. If you do then you can make it happen by coming and rating papers on PLoS ONE. If it works here then other publishers will “hop on the trend”.
About: Summer Vacation in the Canadian Rockies
1. Who cares? I expected more science involved. Instead it’s this screaming “Give me money, please!”
About: SensiGen Secures Option for Licensing Lupus Biomarkers
2. This is pointless without an opinion. Anybody could find a better content of this news article just with a google RSS
About: PLoS ONE Adds Five Star Ratings for Research Papers
3. Plos ONE is really poor. Remember that recent Pavlov’s cockroach article? Simply ridiculous
http://improbable.com/2007/06/15/drooling-from-dog-to-cockroach-in-a-century/
1. What does my vacation have to do with screaming for money?
2. Point taken.
3. Glad you agree.
Thanks for your comments.
Chris,
Do I want ratings to work? Sure. I think the feature is very “now” and I commend PLoS for taking steps to try to encourage more interaction with your papers.
And please don’t take my comment about the journal’s perception the wrong way. That is just my personal opinion and that is not meant to take away from the journal’s offerings.
However, with that said I have had a hard time finding any articles in PLoS ONE worth reading. And I would have a hard time seeing PLoS ONE publish anywhere near what they have if PLoS Biology, Genetics, etc. were not recommending rejected authors to submit to PLoS ONE. So in that sense I think it’s a fair assessment that PLoS ONE is publishing a considerable number of papers that were rejected from another PLoS journal for one reason or another.
Almost related to http://www.ChemRank.com which is a kind of Digg for research papers, although at a last look there was something of a spam problem, unfortunately.
db