In a sense, publishing a research paper is part of an ongoing public discussion, in reply to all the other authors cited in your work.
Apart from that, there are talks at conferences which are open to discussion with the audience.
I suppose there's not really a need for much more than that, in the public sphere. There is plenty of private discussion amongst one's peers of course.
Personal blogs and twitter are the main outlets. See https://twitter.com/mbeisen and http://www.michaeleisen.org/ for an example of an extremely publicly engaged scientist. You can poke around his twitter graph to see other hubs.
It all depends on the research group... I see a lot of activity on Facebook when an interesting paper comes out. Also https://www.researchgate.net/ is quite popular, but mostly for pre-publication discussions. The whole http://arxiv.org/ system is designed to stimulate discussion before a paper is published.
No, I just know that a few research groups have discussions on their FB group. I guess the problem is that articles are very specialised, and so the number of people you can discuss with (and that are interested in doing that!) is quite small. So probably most of the discussion happens via closed communications means (vis-a-vis chat, email, ...) Of course very high impact papers are an exception with regards to that. To have a background idea: http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/killing-pigs-weed-map...
What I have in mind is the instances when I read a paper (read: dozens of papers on a refined area), the methods section leaves out 10-99% of the details, and I spend significant time and effort searching for the details if they exist at all anywhere.
12 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 27.8 ms ] thread(Note: a New Zealand company in this field spammed me to get me to sign up, so that was an immediate "no" to wanting to even name them.)
FWIW, I thought there was already a lot of public discussions among academics.
But you asked about public discussions, which is a rather different topic.
Apart from that, there are talks at conferences which are open to discussion with the audience.
I suppose there's not really a need for much more than that, in the public sphere. There is plenty of private discussion amongst one's peers of course.
I'm not concerned only with "public" engagement, but informal discussion amongst a diverse crowd of academics.
Right, people tend to bring these up on Facebook, but it's typically a scattered discussion.
Are there any Facebook Groups in particular that you know of that facilitate informed, rational discussion?
What I have in mind is the instances when I read a paper (read: dozens of papers on a refined area), the methods section leaves out 10-99% of the details, and I spend significant time and effort searching for the details if they exist at all anywhere.