RG is mainly for sharing research outputs, finding research collaborators, increasing visibility of research project/output, but not for helping scientist in improving the quality of their work.

ResearchGate members can post comments on the articles shared at ResearchGate. This would be useful for improving the quality of the articles published by ResearchGate members, though improvements might be attained only slowly.

What about comments and notes already in the peer-review literature? Because it is quite common to have articles largely cited.

For example: Article A has been cited (230 times).

And it is "a bit" complicated to find within those 230 articles the comments that enable improvements over the Article A.

I am working on a script to capture pieces of critiques (comments and notes) linked to largely cited articles. Please see my example (http://wikiletters.org/wl-remarks) and let me know how if that can be improved. The link may not be available during the transfer to a new webhosting that will allow me to include neat implementations to the outputs to the general public.  

The aforementioned links would help researchers publishing those pieces of comments and notes to get visibility over the articles they are citing. Therefore, a reader of an article by author (X) that was cited by author (Y) would have easy access to the contribution by (Y).

To my view, these links would enable improvements on new articles, and help writers of those little comments and notes (e.g., author Y) to get visibility to their contribution. Would you suggest a variant approach to avoid missing important piece of information in peer-reviewed articles?? Ta.

You know the quality is a relative issue. Because if there is hijaked and predatory journals. There are also thief journals do just a business masked by high quality !!!

Dear Fernando,

I have read your above comment and your Web page http://wikiletters.org/links. I think that Wikiletters will surely become a useful tool for improving articles.

ResearchGate is also attaching similar links to some citations. See, for example, the first of the 19 citations of my article at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/243629907_Approximations_to_Landau%27s_distribution_functions_for_the_ionization_energy_loss_of_fast_electrons.

Regards,

Tatsuo

Article Approximations to Landau's distribution functions for the io...

Dear Prof. Tatsuo Tabata,

Thank you very much for the prompt reply.

I have observed that RG is linking citations to articles, and that includes yours. However, if that number 19 keeps growing, then can you tell me which article would be providing a "minor" or large critique about your article? You would probably need to read those 19 articles, and all future articles citing your papers.

If  author A publishes an article, and discuss about a small issue in your article (Tabata et al year), this piece of critique should be easily provided to anyone reading your article (WL aims to cover this area in WL-Links). Therefore, anyone reading your article would benefit from your contribution and probably from the comment by author A. 

WL will be also providing a CitationNetwork of Critiques (CNC) to your articles, my articles and everybody else's articles.

Researchgate is just linking articles to your paper on the traditional way that Google Scholar and other search-engines already do. The CNC in wikiletters-links has potential to improve articles. Please let me know if you have anything else in mind that I can incorporate in WL to improve our system.

I am transferring wikiletters.org to another webhosting service in order to optimize our database and provide a good service to everybody.  and clear to everybody.

Thanks indeed for your kind attention given to this matter.

Sincerely,

F.

Without writing one cant not achieve quality paper out of good research even.

WikiLetters is an interesting idea. Once fully functional, I believe that it would be a useful tool for improving the quality of articles by eliminating some "minor issues" such as incomplete data sets, retracted articles etc...

Researchers supposed to write their researches regardless of the existence of researchgate. So, it is a matter of quality not quantity..

Liqaa 

Researchgate has wide circulation and many contacts with research workers. This is helping to make publications and knowledge to be widely disseminated.

Dear Liqaa,

I totally agree with you. It is indeed a matter of quality not quantity. Because of that WL aims to generate links between critiques to their cited articles. Our goal is to improve quality by avoid making  "minor" mistakes of the past.

When fully functional, WL aims to give you all critiques (from published articles) to one or more articles you wish to read. Therefore, WL will bring you information about what you should potentially avoid from your selected articles.  Moreover, WL shall increase visibility of articles providing those small critiques through the link platform.

I have provided a really nice example at: http://wikiletters.org/wl-remarks.

We would provide some short videos linked to WL in order to explain the functionality of each branch (4 in total).

Cheers :)

F.

WL also aims to shape our actions with the goal of achieving an improved scientific system.

Dear All,

We have already analysed different system such as PubPeer, Publons, Journal Club, JournalReview.org that provide comments about articles, open discussion etc. 

We have also checked a really good work by retractionwatch, that provides  information about articles been retracted from journal. Therefore, it helps researchers to be aware of those issues.

We have learned from the aforementioned systems in order to provide an innovative database that has potential to mitigate error propagation in new articles (links, comments, letters and retracted). 

We are more than happy to receive any new ideas that might be incorporated into WL-system. And links from your article(s) that explicitly improved someone's work, because these links would be part of our citationnetwork of published critiques.

Thanks,

F.

Quality is the satisfaction of customer .....

and achieving an improvement .