ResearchHub product update — 6/28/2022

Over the last month, ResearchHub was focused on a variety of aesthetic improvements, bug fixes, and long-term planning for features on our site.

Redesigning our paper page + homepage feed

We recently made a point of improving the readability of our paper pages. To do this, we constrained the maximum width of text that appears on the screen and we used more accessible fonts. In addition, we want to bring more attention to the authors of the papers shared to ResearchHub. The authors have been moved from the right-sidebar to take a more prominent position directly under the title in the redesign as seen below:

In the interest of keeping our design consistent, we also updated the homepage feed cards to mirror the new paper page. While we were at it, we also tweaked our community reviews to be a 5-star scale instead of a 10-point scale.

Brainstorming a revenue-generating feature

Over the past few weeks, we have also been doing a lot of product work around generating revenue for ResearchHub. We initially listed out ~10 potential revenue-generating features, and after polling our community have been narrowed down to the top 2:

Bounties — Let users post generic bounties for various requested actions. Someone questioning the results of a published paper could create a bounty for an expert post-publication peer-review, or there could be bounties for experts to answer scientific questions. We are considering 3–5 bounty usecases for the v1.

Community survey results:

Funding — Connect people who want to fund science with scientists & labs that do great research. In a perfect world, we would love to help patrons of science earn a return on their research grant investment. ResearchHub’s community could crowdsource grant application review and help funders complete due diligence on their funding decisions at a reduced cost.

Community survey results:

If you are interested in contributing to these discussions, stop by the ResearchHub community Discord and say hi!

Content Moderation System

We also shipped ResearchHub’s first content moderation system. Editors and moderators can now easily remove content from ResearchHub that they deem to be infringing on a copyright, spammy, or unscientific:

A v2 Reputation System

Previously, our reputation (REP) system was tied to ResearchCoin earnings. This caused our reputation for some users to balloon when they accrued a lot of RSC via the “supporting” feature.

A user’s reputation score should measure how credible someone is on ResearchHub (as a formally trained academic scientist OR someone who contributes a lot of value to ResearchHub community). The old system was not accomplishing this goal so we decoupled reputation from RSC and built in some safeguards around how users can earn REP. In order for your account to be able to give out REP on ResearchHub when you upvote conent you need to have a base level of 110 REP. This number is flexible and we will update it according to the collective activity on our site.

OpenAlex API

OpenAlex is a huge database and API of metadata associated with scientific research outputs. Integrating the OpenAlex API into ResearchHub allows us to grab a lot more information about the papers posted to our forum. This includes better data on authors, as well as if a paper is open access or not. One implementation of OpenAlex is the open access filter that you will now see on ResearchHub’s homepage:

Squashing bugs and making incremental improvements

At last, here is a miscellaneous list of smaller fixes and feature improvements that we have shipped recently:

Improved the accuracy of our homepage trending user list — fixed a bug that created a discrepancy between the trending user list on the homepage and the top user leaderboard.
Hiding RSC balance — many users did not want their RSC balance to appear on their personalized ResearchHub homepage in case they were sharing their screen or using ResearchHub in a public place. We removed the RSC balance from the navbar and it now requires a click to see how much RSC you have.
Preventing copyright infringement — we Removed the option to upload PDF of papers we know are not open access (thanks to OpenAlex!)
Created a maximum number of hubs per document — now every paper/post/hypothesis can have a maximum of three hubs
Added the ability to feature a post on the homepage — if ResearchHub is hosting a journal club or other event, we can direct attention to the corresponding posts for a more robust discussion
Re-designed & resumed the “Trending Papers on ResearchHub” email
Improved load times of the homepage feed
Improved our coverage of open-access PDFs
Improved load times for the Paper Page — check out this graph of our backend load time improvements:

Backend loading speeds for the slowest 95th percentile of users

The release of the new paper page redesign shot us up to a high of .57s roughly three weeks ago. During our last engineering sprint we brought this number back down to .25s.

ResearchHub product update — 6/28/2022

ResearchHub product update — 6/28/2022

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