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I was wondering if there are any websites out there which

  • systematically provide space for the discussion of mathematics articles (particularly those on the arXiv, though not necessarily just those), and
  • have a large enough user base to have some hope of having a good discussion (or at least have hope of attracting one in the near future).

Of course, MO is not so far from such a site, but is organized around questions, not papers, which leads to rather different discussion in practice. Similarly, some blog posts and nLab pages serve this purpose, but are not created systematically.

Gerry Myerson
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maxdev
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    The department tearoom, blogs, seminars, conferences, etc. This question is not appropriate for MO and I have voted to close. – Andy Putman Jan 03 '11 at 20:21
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    Seconding Andy Putman. I am a bit puzzled as to the thought processes behind the question. One can discuss arXiv papers anywhere one discusses mathematics, and what is more sometimes one can discuss it with people rather than online. (Or you can just email friends and colleagues) – Yemon Choi Jan 03 '11 at 20:30
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    Maybe the question is not appropriate for MO, but Andy Putnam's and Yemon Choi's comments don't make sense. Obviously there are innumerable forums for discussion of anything, but if it were universally known that for each arXiv paper there is an accompanying discussion page (which need not exist before someone actually decides the particular paper is worth discussing) then everyone on the planet interested in discussing a particular paper would be gathered together in the same internet forum: that particular paper's discussion page. The department tea room can't do that. – Michael Hardy Jan 03 '11 at 22:12
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    @Michael : The audience for most papers on the arXiv is quite small (definitely less than 20 people, and probably much smaller than that). Moreover, given the small size of the mathematics community most of those people already know each other and are in contact via email, conferences, etc. I doubt that a website like that would be very useful. If you have a question about a paper, email the author! – Andy Putman Jan 03 '11 at 22:54
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    By the way, my last name is "Putman", not "Putnam" (grumble grumble grumble)... – Andy Putman Jan 03 '11 at 22:54
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    @Andy: you make a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are 100s of people who would like to participate (a handful of which are also capable), but they are forever locked out of "the community" because of location, inability to travel, intimidated by BIG NAMES. They can't become part of the community because they aren't already part of the community. – Kevin O'Bryant Jan 03 '11 at 23:04
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    Such a forum (as Michael suggests) would also serve to collect errata. – Kevin O'Bryant Jan 03 '11 at 23:14
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    @Kevin : Are there really that many people who have the technical training and inclination to comment intelligently on math papers but who are not part of the "community" of mathematicians? A big problem that I foresee is that such a site would become a magnet for cranks. MO works because of community moderation, but I can't imagine such a thing working on a site like the one you envision. – Andy Putman Jan 03 '11 at 23:18
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    In case there's any further discussion about this question, I've started a meta page http://tea.mathoverflow.net/discussion/881/is-there-a-place-where-people-discuss-arxivorg-papers/ – Theo Johnson-Freyd Jan 04 '11 at 00:54
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    I think Michael's suggestion is fantastic. Someone should create that at once. – Vivek Shende Jan 04 '11 at 02:21
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    I've rewritten the question; all comments before this refer to an earlier version. – Ben Webster Jan 04 '11 at 03:23
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    Maybe I'm atypical, but I don't think organizing discussions by paper would be very useful. There's great demand for a home on the internet for tea-style mathematical discussions (and the demand is not being fully satisfied by blogs), but I don't think there's nearly as much demand for discussion of specific papers. Plus I'd expect a classification by paper to degenerate very quickly, with discussions going off on lengthy tangents or crossing over between various papers. Either you enforce the classification strictly (and upset people) or it will quickly become more or less meaningless. – Henry Cohn Jan 04 '11 at 04:45
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    I should apologize then Andy, I have been reading "Putnam" in my head every single time. – Sean Tilson Jan 04 '11 at 05:52
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    @Henry- You may well be right; there are a whole host of reasons why this is probably a bad idea. I'd still want to know if someone implemented it. – Ben Webster Jan 04 '11 at 06:50
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    @Andy: Sorry about the spelling. The number of people wishing to discuss most papers would be zero, I would think. In those cases no discussion page would be created. It's the ones that several people want to discuss that matter. You say most of those people know each other. Do you know most of the people who discuss things with you on MO? People wishing to discuss the same paper who've never heard of each other would communicate on such pages. What would happen with most pages (no discussion) is beside the point. – Michael Hardy Jan 04 '11 at 07:39
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    Henry Cohn's point could be address via a mechanism for merging or splitting discussion pages, so that something that begins as a discussion of one paper might become a page for discussion of a specified set of 19 papers. Also, what Henry Cohn (or anyone) would expect should not be taken seriously. What would you expect to happen if an encyclopedia were created by anyone who chose to contribute? On January 14th, 2001, most reasonable people would have said it would be just a bunch of graffiti. You have to judge by the record, not by what reasonable people say "would" (sic) happen. – Michael Hardy Jan 04 '11 at 07:42
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    @Henry: Look at Wikipedia article discussion pages. Mostly they stay on-topic. Their purpose is not to discuss the topic of the page, i.e. if the article is about John Xmith, the purpose of the article's discussion page is not to discuss John Xmith. Rather, it is to discuss how to edit the Wikipedia article about John Xmith. Maybe they "would" "degenerate very quickly, with discussions going off on lengthy tangents or crossing over between various", but in fact mostly they don't. That rarely if ever happens. – Michael Hardy Jan 04 '11 at 07:47
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    Andy Putman wrote: "A big problem that I foresee is that such a site would become a magnet for cranks. MO works because of community moderation, but I can't imagine such a thing working on a site like the one you envision." Andy, were you writing about Wikipedia? I suggest that any particular person's inability to imagine something before it's done is of no interest. – Michael Hardy Jan 04 '11 at 07:52
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    I mean, that's EXACTLY what any reasonable person would have said about Wikipedia before it existed, and very many did! – Michael Hardy Jan 04 '11 at 07:53
  • An honorable mention will be awarded to the first person to identify the significance of the date I mentioned above: January 14th, 2001. – Michael Hardy Jan 04 '11 at 07:58
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    @Michael : There are few active people in my little subarea of math that I haven't met (and I've also met a large number of the MO regulars). This isn't exceptional -- math is a small world, and if you regularly attend conferences you'll run into most people. This is why this is different from wikipedia -- the number of people who are qualified to discuss a particular paper is tiny, and they mostly already talk to each other in other ways. Frankly, as M. Greenblatt said below, I'd be loath to post papers to the arXiv if there were some quasiofficial place where cranks could comment on them. – Andy Putman Jan 04 '11 at 08:05
  • This discussion is getting a little out of hand (there were 4 posts made while I composed my last one!). I think I'll bow out now. – Andy Putman Jan 04 '11 at 08:07
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    Regarding the cranks problem, such a site could simply import MathOverflow reputation, and also arXiv tag specific reputation. Technically, all one would require to authenticate one as the same user on MathOverflow and the arXiv review site is some sort of cookie on ones MathOverflow profile page. Google does just this sort of thing with its webmaster tools, allowing webmasters to authenticate themselves as the true owners of any given website. – Paul Delhanty Jan 04 '11 at 09:28
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    I think the best way to find out is to have such a site, with each discussion being "moderated", and with each participant using MO like identities. In thought one can run many experiments, but whether such a discussion site is useful, helpful, meaningful, painful, sustainable, etc. etc., can perhaps be best judged after running it first on a trial basis. Of course, this solution is also junk, because the hard part is setting up such a site in the first place. – Suvrit Jan 04 '11 at 10:20
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    @Andy: What about those who are not in your little subarea but who might get seduced into it by reading a preprint on the arXiv? Or who might not get seduced into doing research in that area but who might see its connections with some other area that he works in, and acquaint you with those connections for the first time? Wikipedia has always been open to cranks, but that hasn't hurt it much! (Should we distinguish between cranks---those who are "cranky", obsessed with a particular idiosyncratic point of view---and crackpots---those who pontificate from a position of ignorance?) – Michael Hardy Jan 04 '11 at 17:08
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    This important question now arises: Who among those who run the arXiv should be contacted with a proposal to allow creation of a discussion page for each paper? (I don't actually know who runs the arXiv.) – Michael Hardy Jan 04 '11 at 17:15
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    I don't really want this comment thread to get out of hand, but would like to second Andy Putman's scepticism. I'm also not sure the similarities between such a proposed system and Wikipedia outweigh the differences (different audience; different cultural norms; different concern about signal/noise ratio). I speak as someone who spent an annoying few days arguing on Wikipedia with a grad student who thought he knew the (old) definition of B*-algebra, and had manifestly read less func an. than I had; now multiply this problem up & factor in a large dose of "please explain your paper to me Prof" – Yemon Choi Jan 04 '11 at 18:19
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    @Michael: I would imagine that people who are not in Andy's subarea but are interested in his paper & have comments/questions would discuss it with someone in their physical vicinity, or email their supervisor, or ask their colleagues, or email Andy. I don't see why wider conversation (as opposed to crowdsourcing for particular solutions, which is what I see MO's metier as) is better than personal(ized) conversation, mathblogs notwithstanding. – Yemon Choi Jan 04 '11 at 18:26
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    @Michael: You can find out more about who is influential at the arXiv at http://arxiv.org/help/scientific_ad_board, but I would strongly recommend against trying to make discussion pages part of the actual arXiv. Anybody who wants to try can make their own discussion site, even based on arXiv paper numbers and metadata, and if enough people band together maybe it would catch on, but the arXiv itself should avoid any unnecessary controversy (and I think the discussion here shows that this would be controversial, regardless of whether it would actually turn out to be a good idea). – Henry Cohn Jan 04 '11 at 20:03
  • Thank you, Henry. I've contacted them, telling them of this present discussion and summarizing some of it. – Michael Hardy Jan 06 '11 at 06:18
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    I don't understand the strong skepticism, I think such a site would be great! Even if I know everyone in my area it's still good to have a place to ask "Is there a typo in theorem 3.5" and to make a comment "proposition 1.4 part (b) is now generalized in the paper by XYZ". – Arend Bayer Jan 06 '11 at 08:39
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    As a graduate student still just finding my way around the research community, I think such a forum would be a great way to interact with other people interested in the same material I am in, that I don't readilly get on MO or even at my graduate school. I can imagine that there are lots of advanced undergraduates and graduate students who become interested in a topic, and it turns out that the school that they are at does not have too many people that do research in that field! I was rather alone in my interest in category theory as an undergraduate; this is one reason I joined MO. – Glen M Wilson Jan 13 '11 at 18:17
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    Related discussion on academia.SE: Is there a good site for holding online discussions of scientific papers? – Martin Sleziak Nov 29 '15 at 10:52
  • Here's a related question: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/122125/math-annotate-platform. – Josiah Park Mar 09 '19 at 20:45
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    A recent question which is (to some extent) related: Peer review 2.0. – Martin Sleziak Jun 02 '21 at 10:07
  • Actually I don’t think it would attract cranks. Most (all?)Cranks are interested in ‘general’ mathematics or big name conjectures, not any specific paper. – Heavensfall Jun 02 '21 at 18:19

15 Answers15

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Time to mention the Selected Papers Network: https://selectedpapers.net

EDIT:

I hope that Tim does not mind me editing this to add extra links:

Introductory discussion by John Baez: http://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/06/14/the-selected-papers-network-part-2/

Introductory discussion by Tim Gowers: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/06/16/the-selected-papers-network/#more-4954

Neil Strickland
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gowers
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    @gowers: Is a google+ account required for this website? – Ricardo Andrade Jun 19 '13 at 12:24
  • I think you can make contributions by registering directly with the site, and anybody can read it. But Google Plus is a particularly convenient way of contributing, since all you have to do is write a normal post and add the #spnetwork hashtag. In due course other social networks will be added, but Google Plus has the advantage that public posts are genuinely public. – gowers Jun 20 '13 at 13:18
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    Is this website still functioning? – rambalachandran Oct 13 '16 at 02:53
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    @WanderingMind - no! – Jamie Vicary Jun 24 '17 at 19:46
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I'm pretty sure the answer to the question as asked is "No". At present there does not seem to exist a unique web location dedicated to discussing each individual mathematical article.

It would be technically feasible, and to my mind advantageous, to set up a "talk" page attached to each arXiv article. I have seen this suggestion on various mathematical blogs (unfortunately, I can't remember which ones, and googling doesn't turn them up; this answer, like the question, is CW, so if you know of any, please just include a link). I certainly do not know enough about web design to draft such a system, and the folks who run the arXiv do, but are horribly overworked as it is, so I doubt that they'll be writing anything anytime soon. I encourage others with massive web-fu to create some code and send it towards the arXiv administrators, but they might not even have the time to look at it. (When you are thinking about how best to set up such a site, please do keep in mind that well-working online forums tend to have fairly heavy moderation. Moderator attention is definitely not sufficient to have a well-run site, and not strictly necessary, but it helps. Since there aren't nearly enough people out there eager to moderate random columns on the arXiv, one proposal I've seen is for arXiv authors to have the option to open a talk page, with the commitment that they themselves participate and moderate.) (Another thing to think about is how to convince NSF to fully underwrite the costs at arXiv.)

Note that although most mathematics papers are available on arXiv, it is not the only database of papers. I could imagine adding a talk page to each bibliographic entry at Numdam, for example, or to each article at Web of Science.

Something like a "talk" page does exist for (almost) every (published) mathematical article, but I don't think it's what the question is after. MathSciNet and Zentralblatt include reviews of every (almost) article in their databases, written by experts. This does not accomplish the goal of "systematically provid[ing] space for the discussion of mathematics articles", but it is something.

Theo Johnson-Freyd
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    I am probably too cynical, but I am not convinced that everyone who wants to comment has something of substance to offer. Not to mentioned papers churned out by people who are just turning the handle; I envision comment threads filling up with the mathematical equivalent of yes-men – Yemon Choi Jan 04 '11 at 06:48
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    Also, Theo, I find your last para somewhat puzzling. The whole point of invited/commissioned reviews is that they are not talk pages; there is a deliberate barrier to commentary, and a deliberate avoidance of open discussion with all and sundry. Now these reviews are of course not the be all and end all, and in many cases are of less use to interested parties than a well-moderated blog discussion; but they have, and always intended to have, a different aim. – Yemon Choi Jan 04 '11 at 06:52
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    If arxiv papers had to have a talk page, it would allow anyone to criticize a paper and the author would likely feel compelled to respond. Given the type of "commentary" you see on most web forums, including math forums, I think this would just drag down the arxiv and a lot of people would even stop using it. I can see myself stop putting papers on the arxiv if I had to deal with random internet people with an opinion and arxiv access. And even if it were made optional, many people would still voluntarily use it and the same type of thing would still go on. – Michael Greenblatt Jan 04 '11 at 07:04
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    @Michael : I feel exactly the same way. – Andy Putman Jan 04 '11 at 07:20
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    I think Michael Greenblatt's and Andy Putman's fears are exaggerated. The same objections could far more easily be adduced to prove that Wikipedia could never work, since the pages "would" just get filled with graffiti. But it works. – Michael Hardy Jan 04 '11 at 20:11
  • @Yemon (2nd comment): I hope to emphasize that I don't think that Math Reviews are what the original question was after. I did want to bring them up to say that there are things not too distant from a "talk" page that definitely do exist, and are worth reading. @Michael and Yemon: Absolutely, it would be easy to set up a horrible system, and hard to set up a good one. MathOverflow could also "fill up with the mathematical equivalent of yes-men" or "allow anyone to criticize a paper ... and a lot of people would even stop using it". I can't guarantee these won't happen, but they haven't yet. – Theo Johnson-Freyd Jan 05 '11 at 03:41
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    If commenting was restricted to those who can already post to the arXiv (i.e., authors), that eliminates 99.99% of the nonsense "on most web forums", and 95% of the nonsense on "math forums". The quality on MO is quite high, and there is absolutely no barrier to posting here. – Kevin O'Bryant Jan 05 '11 at 21:09
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    In a sense the arXiv does have a way for users to comment on papers, as there is a "track-back" feature where any time an arXiv paper is mentioned on a specific family of blogs and webpages, the arXiv keeps track of it. For example, this forum is one such location that that arXiv tracks back to. – Ryan Budney Jan 05 '11 at 23:39
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    One side effect of having an automatic talk page for every paper is that it will make authors realise just how tiny the audience for their papers really is. I post about my own papers on my blog and these are reliably the least viewed and least commented upon articles on my site. This is fine with me - the comments that I do get are often of extremely high quality (and also supply some valuable corrections and references) - but it is likely that many authors may overestimate, at least initially, the magnitude of impact that any of their papers will have. – Terry Tao Jan 13 '11 at 16:04
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    Terry: I completely agree. I think that one of the most important moments in one's mathematical career is when the number of people which are interested in one's paper enough to actually read it more-or-less completely becomes bigger than 1 (1 corresponds to the advisor). I'm still waiting for this moment, and I suspect it might be that suprisingly large percentage of mathematicians is still waiting for this moment. – Łukasz Grabowski Jan 13 '11 at 17:48
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Although no such system exists formally (as far as I know) there is an informal way to do this. Namely make some comments on a blog or web page and then add a trackback to the arXiv page. If this happened on a regular basis then it could be developed into something more systematic along the lines you are suggesting. My feeling is that only a small percentage of papers would attract any discussion.

Bruce Westbury
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    Right. Haven't there been posts dedicated to discussing particular papers on the n-category cafe? – Qiaochu Yuan Jan 04 '11 at 11:23
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    My experience is that this paper http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0601209 has a blog link linking to this discussion on the n-category cafe http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2007/09/rotations_in_the_7th_dimension.html Similarly this paper http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9310164 has five blog links. – Bruce Westbury Jan 04 '11 at 13:01
12

http://arxaliv.org/comments

http://arxaliv.org

Ralph Furmaniak created a site based or reditt where people can leave comments and up-vote the arXiv papers. See discussions at

http://publishing.mathforge.org/discussion/83/frontend-to-the-arxiv-httparxalivorg-based-on-reddit/

http://arxaliv.org/r/help/comments/12hd/welcome_to_arxaliv/is

I think this is great, unfortunately not so many contributors, let us contribute ?

Alexander Chervov
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I think this is a very reasonable question. It comes up often enough and deserves an answer. In fact, I see not one but two potential forums. Here is my take.

1) Rumors, followup ideas, small errors, minor comments and remarks on the paper. This is all worth doing on your own blog space. I see no need to make this kind of discussion "official". In fact, the diversity of blogs and opinions is a plus here: less "intimidation by experts", fewer worries about "degeneration" of the discussion, etc. Finally, typos and mistakes in the paper are responsibilities of the author - when you find them, email them to her/him and stop worrying about other readers. In short, I see no need for a single forum for a discussion of this kind.

2) Serious comments, substantial remarks, delicate technical problems with the paper, etc. I think a blog or wiki type discussion forum is a too informal/unserious for contributions of this kind. On a positive side, there is a perfect forum for this kind of discussions: it's called the arXiv! Remember, the arXiv was never meant to be a only a "free storage" of published papers. It has moderators, calls uploaded papers "submissions", and once approved, calls them "publications". A great feature of arXiv is that you can store and advertise there the kind of work that you don't intend to publish in traditional journals. So if you have something important to say to everyone, don't be shy, follow Mnёv's example and post it on the arXiv (here are some other examples). Make sure to add hyperlinks to older arXiv papers if you want it to look more webby. Finally, there is already a great tool to explore forward arXiv citations. So why bother inventing a new forum when the one we have works fine, if only people used it more often for this purpose.

Igor Pak
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  • Igor, you make some interesting points, but it seems to me that your (1) and (2) are two opposite extremes and there's a broad class of things between the two that could be dealt with in discussion pages. – Michael Hardy Jan 04 '11 at 20:08
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You can try SciRate (https://scirate.com/), a site that allows you to rate and comment papers from Arxiv (it updates the list of papers automatically). It doesn't seem to be very popular, though (lack of critical mass?).

Martin Sleziak
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Marcin Kotowski
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I am developing arXiv Analytics which offers more features and a better user interface for reading arXiv eprints. For each arXiv paper there is an accompanying review page which can be used for posting reviews or discussions. The website is still under development. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

soliton
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  • The linked site seems to be down? I hope this is not a direct result of you having posted the link here! – Willie Wong Aug 25 '14 at 15:47
  • It is not down. Sometimes we need perform massive updates for the database in the background, so it become quite slow to respond to users' requests. Try to visit this page http://arxitics.com/help/ first. – soliton Aug 25 '14 at 16:06
5

Slightly facetiously, I'm mildly tempted to vote to close as a duplicate. However, I shan't and shall merely point out that most of the answers to the question: Is a free alternative to MathSciNet possible? are relevant to this question, particularly mine. The question Errata database? which covers similar ground.

(The rForum mentioned in the latter has stalled a little. It could be revived if sufficient interest is shown.)

Community
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Andrew Stacey
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There's a useful list of such sites at http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-websites-where-one-can-post-commentary-and-reviews-of-academic-papers; the best of the lot, in my opinion, is:

Annotatr
http://annotatr.appspot.com/

Try it out!

Marius Kempe
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It seems appropriate to mention Gowers's "Modest Proposal" from fall of 2011. Here is his original post, and then his "more modest proposal." This came about after the OP asked this question and seems very related, since a big benefit of his recommended mathoverflow-like system of submitting papers was the ability to have discussions of those papers. As others have pointed out, this also allows the community to quickly correct errors in the papers and also would reduce the lag-time between when new results are finished and when others can start to build on those results. I'm not sure what ever happened to Gowers's idea, except that there was a lot of discussion at the time and problems were pointed out. If someone knows, I hope he/she will edit this and fill in the details. This also seems related to Alex Chernov's recent answer; maybe Furmaniak's site was based on Gowers's ideas. I'm not really familiar with Reddit, so I don't know how similar it is to what Gowers envisioned.

Martin Sleziak
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David White
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In Peer review 2.0 thread, from 2021, Martin Sleziak suggested to me this ten years old question. So, there is Papers$^\gamma$ with source code under CC0 Public Domain Dedication. It gains the popularity slowly, in an answer to another MO question I explain possible reasons behind this and give more examples of online platforms devoted to paper discussions.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of http://papers-gamma.link.

kerzol
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(This should be put in the thread right below the original question as it does not provide any answer, but I can't leave comments). Yan LeCun wrote down some ideas for a new publishing model/system for Computer Science, also talking about discussing/commenting papers. Reading the comments to this question, his suggestions seem quite relevant.

osdf
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PaperHive seems to fulfill both of your requirements, as far as I have seen. It provides a discussion channel directly next to the document (or in a seperate tab) to ask questions and comment on marked test passages, or to ask for clarifications.

Since arXiv is open access, one can look at most of the arXiv articles on PaperHive, as they are synced with PaperHives frontend. Just search for something, you can even use arXiv ID or DOI for some journals that are available. Most other things look self-explanatory.

A big counter-argument against PaperHive as a discussion board for arXiv articles is that there seems to be a lack of availability of arXiv articles newer than 2016. Maybe that is because of the lack of interest, but it is hopefully easy to fix. I just discovered this problem while writing this.

I'm surprised no one here has heard of it before, it has been around for four years now. It just has no big user base of mathematicians. I still see potential in the concept, and a lot of code for PaperHive has been made open source.

Jonas Frede
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For papers having enough overlap with physics, one possibility is to use the Reviews section of PhysicsOverflow (note that it is possible for the registered PO users to submit there papers for review).

mo-user
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0

Wikiversity has useful technical features (the same as Wikipedia): support for mathematical formulas (MathJax), referencing tools, collaborative editing, discussion pages, version control, email alerts, etc. It can very well be used for discussing mathematical papers.

Sylvain Ribault
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