http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~ovens/loops/wxloop.cgi?vis1km_ca+/48h/

With open preprint systems, being able to find useful and reliable ideas and data in articles is perhaps more important than being able to submit one. This becomes apparent as the number of articles increase, when searching can return hundreds and thousands of articles. One canￂﾒt go through all of them, and a few ￂﾑbadￂﾒ articles can easily cause frustration and distrust in the quality of the submissions.

But if search criteria can include objective measures of article quality, then one can indeed easily find valuable material. Nature Precedings should therefore opt for a point-based rating system where different aspects of articles can be appraised.

Thus, instead of just letting one vote for an article, one should be allowed to rate its different aspects on, say, a 1-5 scale. Such aspects can include:

1. clarity
2. originality
3. novelty
4. presence and quality of experimental data
5. logical procession
6. depth
7. proper referencing

In effect, this would be a proper peer-review system.

The ratings, both their average and their spread, should be displayed alongside articles.

A good review/rating system will discourage submission of bad articles, build trust in the usability and reliability of content in Nature Precedings, and encourage quality submissions.

(similar comments posted elsewhere on the web by me)

i downloaded Zotero a few weeks back, tried it a little bit, but haven’t gotten into it too much

MetaCarta solves this problem by GeoParsing the documents. Our natural language analysis engine extracts and resolves the coordinate meanings of rich text phrases, like Ras Budran Raha.

Now, users can find everything written about any place simply by zooming a map — no more guessing geographic sounding keywords.

Even seemingly simple searches like “red sea” get much better results when you use a map. To see what I mean, try a GeoIntel for Petroleum search for “-red -sea” when zoomed into the Red Sea area. The minus sign operator means exclude documents with this word. You will find that there are many documents about places in this area that do not mention the seemingly obvious region name. Here’s a link to -red -sea in the Red Sea:

http://geointel.metacarta.com/geosearch.html?topic=-red+-sea&place=Red+Sea

Try mousing over the red document icons and looking at the text on the left. The location names are highlighted.

We are now expanding our crawling to reach deeper into web resources and private publishers relevant to this industry. We expect this to solve the dilemma you mentioned. Over time, we will make GeoIntel for Petroleum the richest source of oil field information.

If you have suggestions about content that you would like to see in GeoIntel for Petroleum, please post to the Feedback form on the GeoIntel page.