imalsogreg
commented
10 years ago Thanks for the feedback! I had something related in mind for this: in lieu of letting a comment point to a spot on a picture of the entire paper, maybe a comments can embed "quotes", and a "quote" can be either of (1) copy-pasted text from the paper, or (2) a small screen-grab of a figure from the pdf. Quotes won't be rendered in the comments-overview for a paper, but if you click an "expand" link on any given context, then you'll see the quoted text/pic (as well as any followup discussion about that one comment). Think that would satisfy the needs of people that want to reference something specific in the paper?
Since we can't have content of un-free papers on the site, yet almost all papers have abstracts (do any omit them? and/or Ok to require that?), being able to comment on text in the title/abstract is perhaps the best way available to link feedback remarks to real, quotable specifics in the paper.
One use case for this is to critique the summary. For example, it can occur that results are cited out of context. In psychology, I hate it when papers say "x improved" without offering an effect size. Also whenI read a summary that says "improved x by 5%" and find that result means "only under the conditions that yzq are true". I would love to add a remark on that kind of thing.
That was my brainstorm after our talk today, Greg! What do you think?? //AnneTheAgile