View Full Version : Research Forums
I wonder if others are like me. I don't always click "Read More" on the articles in the Research Forums. The abstracts posted are fairly useful and clicking doesn't always give a lot more information. I think those forums are more popular than they appear in that a lot of people might go read the abstracts on the front page without clicking "Read More" and it qualifying as a "view."
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Wise Young
05-12-2002, 04:36 PM
Jeff, I agree. Most people probably just read the outside. But, in some ways, that is not so bad because it suggests that people who do click to read more are truly interested. To tell you the truth, for a scientific article to get 30 or 40 page views is a compliment. What I do try to do is the summarize the salient points of the abstract as best as I can, given the limited time available to do such summaries.
One of the things that I would very much like to do is to set up an arrangement with the publishers of the journals that would allow us to put attachments of the full papers. This will be very desirable as we get more scientists coming to this site and who will want to see the original papers. It, however, could get very expensive because subscription costs for many of the scientific journals are several thousand dollars per year. Wise.
Wise Young
05-15-2002, 08:54 AM
I just introduced a new forum called "Basic Research", to cover studies that are relevant to the community but does not quite fit into Brain, SCI, Pain, etc. These include, for example, stem cells and other developments. I have embarked on this strategy because many people are not paying attention to the Research Forums, not because they are not interested perhaps, but because the Research Forum just has too many topics mixed up with each other. A poster recently asked for information on MS studies. We have a huge amount of MS information on our site but it is all mixed in with everything else. So, I am trying this approach of segregating the research topics. Comments are welcome.
GermanyC4
05-15-2002, 10:36 AM
I personally have found the abstracts to be a great synopsis of the articles/studies, and will click on the "read more" if I want/need to. Great job - thank you Dr. Young!
Beth
I read the synopsis for every article. Usually, it provides enough info to satisfy me. Perhaps you could count people who enter the research forums rather than individual topics. I think the interest level is higher than indicated by hits on each topic.