A social platform for sharing scientific papers with friends

When choosing what to read, it would be nice to branch out from the medicine and statistics things I normally read. A good starting point would be to browse things my friends have read recently.

For example, now that Bruce and I no longer live together and share magazines, how much easier would it be to branch out if I was able to see the exact paper Bruce just read about biomaterials for repairing inflamed tissue.

Sketching out some details, in case I ever decide to actually sit down and write the code:

Each account has a homepage where their posts are located. A post consists of two things: a) the paper’s title, journal, link, and b) an optional caption spot for the account to write their thoughts, however brief on the paper. Each post has a comments section where discussion may happen, and a like button. Users can search and follow accounts, and their feed is composed of the accounts they follow. An optional feature includes a recommendation engine that creates feeds with posts similar to the user-followed/interacted content.

But, how do people actually post their content? It is too clunky to ask people to copy paste urls, no one wants to do that. Ideally, we would provide one or both of these options: 1) a mimic of ReadCube’s feature of automatically popping up when you enter a scientific paper’s webpage or click their extension’s button, 2) being an option when you click the ‘share to’ button on a paper’s webpage.

So, to create a post, you would download the Chrome extension. Upon landing on a paper’s webpage, clicking the extensions’ button shares it to your account. A similar feature is offered by ReadCube - it deposits the article in a database viewable by your organization. To view your feed and account, there would be a webpage and app structured like a text-based instagram.

This might be useful in passively broadening the papers people read beyond their specific research area.