So I was thinking recently about review articles, and I was wondering if there was a way to invert the entire process. Right now, we have a pool of money for funding, researchers apply for funding to write papers, and then experts look at the state of the art and periodically write reviews. Wouldn't it be nice if the state of the art was a living document which provided the structure for individual research? After all, nowadays we have Wikis and collaborative editing tools.
The same sort of data structure could probably work for any topic, assuming you have the correct organization and filters. So for example, longevity research, one view could be a picture of the entire human body and the user should be able to zoom in on different sections, such as the heart or kidney. Or you could change the view to ascend the conceptual ladder of genomic/protein/cellular/organ systems, and then the user might filter only for sections looking for drugs that target mTOR. You could zoom into rapamycin that way, or you could reach the same result from a view which is a list of all promising drug candidates sorted by lifespan increase in male mice. At any level of granularity, the result would have an infinitely scrolling list of articles, algorithmically sorted according to some criteria such as age-weighted citation count, beside an autogenerated summary of the state of the art (complete with links), and suggestions on views for conceptually adjacent topics. And open questions.
You start soliciting researchers to start adding open questions to different keywords as well, which other researchers can upvote. Then you go to funders and ask them to start attaching bounties to these questions, for registered reports, raw data, data analysis, and review, as well as retroactive funding.
Done right, it could become THE journal, with the whole ecosystem: funding, research, communication, with each one being done better than what we currently have.
Interesting. Could this be applied to grant-giving organizations in the arts and humanities as well as the sciences?
So I was thinking recently about review articles, and I was wondering if there was a way to invert the entire process. Right now, we have a pool of money for funding, researchers apply for funding to write papers, and then experts look at the state of the art and periodically write reviews. Wouldn't it be nice if the state of the art was a living document which provided the structure for individual research? After all, nowadays we have Wikis and collaborative editing tools.
The same sort of data structure could probably work for any topic, assuming you have the correct organization and filters. So for example, longevity research, one view could be a picture of the entire human body and the user should be able to zoom in on different sections, such as the heart or kidney. Or you could change the view to ascend the conceptual ladder of genomic/protein/cellular/organ systems, and then the user might filter only for sections looking for drugs that target mTOR. You could zoom into rapamycin that way, or you could reach the same result from a view which is a list of all promising drug candidates sorted by lifespan increase in male mice. At any level of granularity, the result would have an infinitely scrolling list of articles, algorithmically sorted according to some criteria such as age-weighted citation count, beside an autogenerated summary of the state of the art (complete with links), and suggestions on views for conceptually adjacent topics. And open questions.
You start soliciting researchers to start adding open questions to different keywords as well, which other researchers can upvote. Then you go to funders and ask them to start attaching bounties to these questions, for registered reports, raw data, data analysis, and review, as well as retroactive funding.
Done right, it could become THE journal, with the whole ecosystem: funding, research, communication, with each one being done better than what we currently have.