I am impressed about ResearchGate and the high quality of so many answers in several fields; this includes very detailed answers from prestigious scientists and from entusiastic students. But sometimes the quality of answers is not that high and could distract from the topic or could prevent others from adding a better answer. As far as I understand, there is a system to qualify an answer as good or bad, or a question as good or bad - but there does not seem to be a tool to specifically prevent some of the bad answers. How could one improve that. Should the originator of a question get some tools to act like a moderator of a question and stop others from participating in a discussion after a very bad answer?
I believe that we should distinguish between the different types of bad answers to the questions :
- I do not think the score is a problem because it is easy to see how it was generated;
- There are troublemakers , but the thing is obvious and it is just a noise ;
- There are answers posed by those who work on the margins of the issue and often these responses may be futile for the insiders , but sometimes can provide some alternative point of view , I think it is a cost that we have to pay ;
- A few young enthusiasts sometimes escapes a sufficiently linear path , I believe that we should participate in their activities , giving the example of sobriety , without angrily rebukes ; grapple with the important issues is a necessity (one of the many reasons why I chose to become a pathologist , former medical school , was that I could take a very difficult case and try to solve it, always with a negative result, but I learned a lot in this procedure.)
- There are real questions but others that somehow suggests some attention to the problem, in this case the answers may not be relevant, but who asked this type of questions must be put into the account this possibility ;
- Regarding the issue of peer review I think it's a system that does not work well, but at the moment I see no alternative. Although I believe that a history of reproducibility of the proposed results should be able to provide alternatives to peer review and on the other hand I think that many articles should receive a negative score in evaluating a career, even if published in peer review journals. The problem of the deal between specialists from various fields of expertise I believe is the core of research in all fields of biology and medicine. I guess a sort of groups like "Los Alamos" in which geneticists , pathologists , biochemists, clinicians , experts in bone metabolism of sugars lipids etc. , neuroscientists , ophthalmologists , experts in computing etc, etc. . can all argue about a goal. what purpose? I think the best situations are "at edge of chaos"; diseases in which not too many genes are involved can become paradigmatic to attack from outside the situations in which chaos prevails (for example, tumors with multiple mutations , loss of genomic material of different quantity and quality, etc.).
To return to the issues that you have highlighted, perhaps we could better explain what we try (maybe it could somehow be formalized distinguishing applications in operational , speculative, evocative and so on).
This is an example of a bad answer because, with too many words, I told you that I can not answer.
Hello Robert,
so far the only way is to upvote or to downvote an answer. I think that the thread opener can be a moderator is not usefull mostly because the community should vote the answer. If somebody write allways bad answer, he should then results in bad RG score because of many downvotes.
This is the same problem one has with papers and the issue you raise sounds like the challenge that peer review was developed to deal with. And many complain that peer review is blocking their publication in various ways. So I'm not sure that there is an easy solution to preventing or removing bad answers. The spectrum of answer quality does give you some information on how informed and rigorous various people and institutions may appear to be.
I believe that we should distinguish between the different types of bad answers to the questions :
- I do not think the score is a problem because it is easy to see how it was generated;
- There are troublemakers , but the thing is obvious and it is just a noise ;
- There are answers posed by those who work on the margins of the issue and often these responses may be futile for the insiders , but sometimes can provide some alternative point of view , I think it is a cost that we have to pay ;
- A few young enthusiasts sometimes escapes a sufficiently linear path , I believe that we should participate in their activities , giving the example of sobriety , without angrily rebukes ; grapple with the important issues is a necessity (one of the many reasons why I chose to become a pathologist , former medical school , was that I could take a very difficult case and try to solve it, always with a negative result, but I learned a lot in this procedure.)
- There are real questions but others that somehow suggests some attention to the problem, in this case the answers may not be relevant, but who asked this type of questions must be put into the account this possibility ;
- Regarding the issue of peer review I think it's a system that does not work well, but at the moment I see no alternative. Although I believe that a history of reproducibility of the proposed results should be able to provide alternatives to peer review and on the other hand I think that many articles should receive a negative score in evaluating a career, even if published in peer review journals. The problem of the deal between specialists from various fields of expertise I believe is the core of research in all fields of biology and medicine. I guess a sort of groups like "Los Alamos" in which geneticists , pathologists , biochemists, clinicians , experts in bone metabolism of sugars lipids etc. , neuroscientists , ophthalmologists , experts in computing etc, etc. . can all argue about a goal. what purpose? I think the best situations are "at edge of chaos"; diseases in which not too many genes are involved can become paradigmatic to attack from outside the situations in which chaos prevails (for example, tumors with multiple mutations , loss of genomic material of different quantity and quality, etc.).
To return to the issues that you have highlighted, perhaps we could better explain what we try (maybe it could somehow be formalized distinguishing applications in operational , speculative, evocative and so on).
This is an example of a bad answer because, with too many words, I told you that I can not answer.
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