ResearchHub product update — 5/8/2022

Retooling the paper upload flow, a v1 peer-review feature, and improving content moderation

We shipped a ton of updates to ResearchHub over the past month. Our major focuses have been:

Improving the paper upload flow
Releasing a v1 peer-review feature
Site-wide design updates
Making content moderation more robust
A variety of important bug fixes

Improving the paper upload flow

Over the past month, we overhauled how papers are uploaded to ResearchHub. First off, we simplified the first step by building a progress bar that indicates where you are in the upload process. Additionally, we shipped the ability for users to add hubs and an editorialized title while the paper is actively uploading.

While the improved UI is nice, an even more important change was made to this feature’s backend. Now we search for papers in a different way — by grabbing the DOI from the link provided and searching through crossref.com to obtain the metadata. This has resulted in significant improvements to our ability to fetch academic papers.

We still see some users having trouble from time to time uploading papers, so if this happens to you please post your problem in the #bug_reports channel on slack or discord and we will be sure to get to it!

A v1 Peer-review feature

We just released a new v1 peer-review feature which we see some users already utilizing! This gives our users the ability to conduct post-publication peer-reviews by “rating” a paper after it is published.

Maybe you love a paper — all the methods are solid, it can be reproduced, and it’s a great result. In that case, you can give a paper a 10/10 and comment on why you gave the score.

But maybe you think a paper is inaccurate or was not rigorous enough. In that case, you can score the paper lower and also comment why.

This rating will show up in the home feed as well as on the paper page itself. In the future we will build a way to filter by this score, so you can see the papers as ranked by the community.

Design updates

We put a lot of work over the past month into making design updates — mostly to the home page feed cards and the paper page.

Our community has shared some feedback that they want the authors of papers to be displayed more prominently. In addition, we also cleaned up the homepage paper cards to make them consistent with the paper page.

Some of the designs have not been shipped yet, but here they are:

Home Feed Option 1:

Home Feed Option 2:

Paper page:

Content Moderation

As you may have noticed, in the previous weeks we have gotten some new users coming to the fold at ResearchHub. This extra attention is great! The only thing is sometimes the content initially shared by new users who are not familiar with ResearchHub’s culture and posting guidelines is not to our community's standard.

To help fix this situation, we are building tools to allow editors and moderators to better moderate the content that shows up on ResearchHub.We are currently working on a portal where editors can see all activity that occurs on the site and remove content they do not believe fits ResearchHub’s quality bar.

As we have a rewards platform, we know that there will always be users who try to come through and “game” our rewards system. We will always actively fight those users and ensure our best users are the ones rewarded, not users who are not adding quality to our platform.

Bug fixes

Finally, we squashed a bunch of bugs over the last month. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the most critical fixes:

We fixed a server-side rendering issue with homepage feed
The homepage feed no longer clears when clicking on logo
There was some information missing on feed cards when searching
We fixed a few bugs associated with sharing a discussion thread
We fixed a CSS issue on our about page on mobile browsers
We fixed a mobile login issue