A tinder for research articles? Not so sure...

I recently came across a press release in Nature about an 'app' to rate research articles that have not been peer-reviewed, but are available in an online preprint service. It is called Papr. The idea is that you rate a paper based on its title and abstract, by swiping in your phone or dragging in your PC.

You can rate the manuscripts deposited in the biorXiv preprint in four categories:

1. Exciting and probable
2. Exciting and questionable
3. Boring and probable
4. Boring and questionable

I gave it a try as I was curious, but unlike tinder where you can make a snap judgement in a fraction of a second, it takes time to  assess fairly a scientific abstract. Even more so if it falls outside your expertise.

You cannot truly judge a paper probable and questionable without giving the abstract a good detailed read, which will already consume quite a few minutes. Not only that, but also if you take into account that most abstracts will fall outside your field of expertise it gets quite tedious after reading just 3 or 4 abstracts.

Moreover, I think it can be potentially very harmful to judge papers as exciting or boring...

Imagine the scenario in which a PhD student from a university in Bolivia spent 5 years studying the effects of environmental change on the photosynthesis yield of a plant of local interest that you have never heard of. It is likely that the PhD student will not have the resources available to most research institutions in developed countries, and so this hypothetical student has only old equipment and virtually no funding to obtain the required data to complete the project.

Now imagine that the student uploaded a preprint of her work on the BiorXiv only to be rated by some fools as Boring and Questionable in a snap microsecond judgement. Rated by some entitled fools that do not understand anything at all about the difficulties of doing research in a developing country.

At the beginning I thought such an app could be fun, but after critically engaging with it, I think perhaps it is not such a great idea.

To the developers of this app I would advise to create an option to narrow the shown papers to the different subcategories that the BiorXiv offers (e.g. Biochemistry, Evolutionary Biology, Bioinformatics, etc). So that it is possible to rate something that is closer to your field of expertise. In addition, I would suggest to change the rating criteria to a numeric score from 1 to 5... but I have my doubts that any kind of value judgement of someones research is of any use at all.