Introducing PaperCritic – an open publication review tool powered by Mendeley API

We live in a world where our lives are broadcast by Facebook and Twitter, our news consumption is dominated by blogs and our knowledge is defined by Wikipedia articles. Yet somehow, science, which should really be at the front of any kind of advances, remains 20 years adrift in terms of the amount of collaboration in its echelons, not to mention when it comes to opening up to the broader public.

In fact, right now, the only acceptable way of presenting one’s academic work and obtaining critical reviews for it is through the tedious and obscure submit-and-wait process. We at PaperCritic find this way of promoting science severely outdated and simply unacceptable.

Thankfully, ever since Mendeley, the biggest player in the publication management market, has opened the door to its resources with an Open API, it has become possible to construct simple and powerful apps that leverage the Mendeley database in order to promote science and make it more collaborative.

Having been made aware of this, as well as the Mendeley/PLoS API Binary Battle, we have quickly put our hands to work and came up with PaperCritic – an app that offer researchers a way of obtaining feedback for their scientific work, and everybody interested – a way of providing it, in a fully open and transparent environment.

Apart from helping the scientific community, PaperCritic also helps you as a researcher or a science enthusiast organize your publication library even better. You’ve surely already embraced all the neat things Mendeley offers, such as tags, summaries and in-text notes. But what you want is to rate the different aspects of publications, or to write critical reviews of your own. Well, using PaperCritic you can now rate and review any publication just like the big guns at IEEE!

Disclaimer: While PaperCritic is powered by the Mendeley API, the two services are in no way affiliated to one another.