PubPeer - Scientific Conversation

PubPeer, The Online Journal Club, is a program that is involved in carrying on the conversation of science, mostly after work has been published.

Nuts and Bolts

Essentially, it appears to work by searching articles based on DOI or other unique identifier (e.g. PubMed ID) through the PubPeer interface. Once the article is found, you can provide comments on it.

Getting started

You become a member by inputting the DOI of a paper you published, selecting which author you are, then providing your institutional email address. ResearchGate is another service that requires an institutional email address to get started.

Providing Commentary

Of course there are guidelines on how to provide appropriate commentary through PubPeer.

The Browser Extension

I, as a good scientist, installed the browser extension. I tried it out searching the keyword "naphthenic acids". No PubPeer results on the first page. I also searched "cancer", "pubpeer" and "metabolomics" and there was no PubPeer commentary on any article on the first page.

Finally, I went to the PubMed featured comment for the day (Oct. 2, 2015) and saw the following page. The yellow bar above the article title shows how many comments are on PubPeer.

To access the PubPeer comment, you click on the white words "1 comment on PubPeer". You are then taken to PubPeer's webspace to explore the comment. The comment at PubPeer is pretty much the same comment below the article in PubMed Commons.

Commenting

I posted my first comment on PubPeer concerning an article about the synthesis of yaku'amide. This is how it looks!

Future

Will they permanently archive commentaries and/or commentary chains with DOIs? What is the difference between PubPeer and PubCommons in PubMed? How is PubPeer different than Disqus?

I know there are subtle differences, but I am still waiting to hear back from those organizations. Until then, PubPeer remains another excellent tool for scientific commentary just waiting to explode!