This lead me to thinking about the continuum from traditional pre-publication peer review to post-publication peer review, from “sanity test” to predicting “impact” or “importance.” Before you know it, I made this (click to enlarge):
Everyone wants peer review to be thorough and rigorous, so that’s the horizontal X axis. Because my last article was on post-publication peer review, the time relative to widespread distribution is the vertical Y axis.
Some points (like the two points for “Conference” and “Peer review”) are separated in the vertical Y axis to make the text legible, not because one always happens before the other. Likewise, each point should be a smear indicating a range, not a point. But this is just a first pass. Maybe this can help characterize the different kinds of peer review and commentary.
Additional: To answer a question posed by Jason Goldman, by “blog posts,” I had in mind blog posts by scientists.
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4 comments:
Good idea. A nice next step would be to make the plot a survey, allowing respondents to adjust the point locations, and display the results as probability density "clouds".
As a librarian, one of my jobs is to help students evaluate the information sources they find. I really like the simplicity of the diagram, as it helps to understand different types of evaluation. It also helps to emphasize that published scholarly work really goes through a wide variety of evaluations. Thanks!
A couple to add:
Comments on a pre-print (such as the super-helpful ones on our PeerJ Barosaurus pre-print which amount to peer-reviews).
Comments on a blog about a paper. These sometimes contain real meat.
Re-use of data published alongside a paper.
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