davidrothman.net

More on JournalReview (Digg for Medical Literature, Part 6.5)

I’m grateful to Jeff Ellis for providing some clarification and additional information in response to my previous post on JournalReview.org.

I criticized JournalReview for not having feeds. It turns out that it DOES have feeds- the problem it that they’re hard to find. Jeff writes:

..it was our assumption (perhaps incorrectly)… that users who where techi enough to want an RSS feed are using a browser that automatically detects them. If you visit any of our specialty pages with a browser capable of detecting an RSS feed… you will see ours throughout the site.

When I first checked out JournalReview, I was at work using IE6 and could not have known there were feeds available unless I viewed the source. I strongly urge Jeff to clearly advertise the presence of RSS feeds as a feature.

Jeff also let me know about other cool community communication features:

If you sign up at journalreview.org, and discuss an article where the author has provided a corresponding e-mail, you will have the option to CC your comment to the author. See attached photo.

In addition, if other members have started to discuss this article – they too will be notified of additional comments left on an article. In this way… we too notify users of updates who are actively discussing an article.

We are setting up a section of user preferences where any user can “monitor” any article, set of articles, or search term for updates… and this too should be live in the coming months.

Whats more… is that not only do we contact the author of an article, but we contact up to 15 experts on that specific topic. Our goal is to call the world experts together to discuss the literature, answer questions, and make progress through the world of scientific publication.

This is all pretty cool and pleasantly different from other sites of this kind, but completely invisible to a new user. Now my largest complaint about JournalReview.org is that it does a poor job of tooting its own horn.