Nick’s Comments (group member since Dec 31, 2008)

Nick’s comments from the Goodreads Developers group.

hurrah for android apps!

MICHAEL wrote: "nice :D

we might add magazines and other periodicals at some point, if we do end up doing that, we'll consider adding academic papers also. What do you think the special characteristics that sep..."

It depends on what you want to do. I was thinking about this today, and what I'd really want for papers is a bit different from what goodreads currently offers.

For papers, you've got something like ISBN in the DOI. It's URI-based, not radix-based, but since ISBN's don't exhibit a well-ordering property, it shouldn't matter. There is a real problem, however, in that the percentage of papers with DOI's is far below that of books with ISBN's.

Given that I really know nothing outside of computer science, physics and math papers, I'm also probably not the best person to ask about this. GRFeedback has plenty of MSLibSci folks that ought be able to authoritatively answer this, though.

More importantly, academic papers would have a very different focus:

- as opposed to fairly unimportant "publisher", there'd be absolutely critical "journal". "author" would be not so much "author" as "author+organization", where organization-based searching would be just as critical (if not more so) than author-based.

- you could chain them by citation tree, ala CiteSeer, and meaningfully supporting papers would pretty much require this.

Now that I think about it, the paradigms for socializing books and papers are very different. It's dubious, I think, that GoodReads could really winningly support socializedpapers without significant effort unapplicable to its main focus -- you'd need an awful lot of code and schema both, for features that 95% of GR users would never touch.

Perhaps we need a RigorousReads.com sister site. Hrmmmmm.

MICHAEL wrote: "I'm working on a widget that lets out add links to book and authors to free text super easily!

What are you guys working on?"

Ahh, I just wrote my "Hello, World" of DOMsmanship; a right-menu "bibtexize" option now generates bibtex-suitable output directly to the clipboard. This will accelerate paper-writing by a few delicious seconds.

It'd be even more effective, of course, if GoodReads handled arbitrary academic papers.

HOT HOLY SHIT OTIS THIS IS AN AWESOME IDEA. If you think otherwise, set ->gradschool to 1 and loop.