I’ve seen a few complaints over the past few weeks about there being a lot of psuedoscience, and there has been a fair amount of reports.
I figured it would be a good idea to update the rules on the sidebar to clearly lay out what is and isn’t allowed.
I think a tagging system might help to keep down on the spam and elevate real scientific sources. These are just a draft and more rules could be added in the future if they are needed.
Current draft (work in progress, add suggestions in comments):
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
Submission Rules:
- All posts must be flagged with an appropriate tag and must be scientific in nature. All posts not following these guidelines will be removed.
- All posts must be peer reviewed and published in a reputable journal, unless flagged as news or discussion. No pseudoscience.
- No self-promotion, blogspam, videos, or memes. See list of unapproved sources below.
Comment Rules:
- Civility to other users, be kind.
- See rule #1.
- Please stay on the original topic in the post. New topics should be referred to a new post/discussion thread.
- See rule #1 again. Personal attacks, trolling, or aggression to other users will result in a ban.
- Report incivility, trolling, or otherwise bad actors. We are human so we only see what is reported.
Flag Options
- [Peer reviewed]
- [News]
- [Discussion]
List of potential predatory journals & publishers (do not post from these sources)
List of unapproved sources:
- Psypost
- Sciencealert
- (any other popsci site that uses titles generally regarded as clickbait)
Original draft:
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
Submission Rules:
- All posts must be flagged with an appropriate tag and must be scientific in nature. All posts not following these guidelines will be removed.
- All posts must be peer reviewed and published in a reputable journal, unless flagged as news or discussion. No pseudoscience.
- No self-promotion, blogspam, videos, or memes.
Comment Rules:
- Civility to other users, be kind.
- See rule #1.
- Please stay on the original topic in the post. New topics should be referred to a new post/discussion thread.
- See rule #1 again. Personal attacks, trolling, or aggression to other users will result in a ban.
- Report incivility, trolling, or otherwise bad actors. We are human so we only see what is reported.
Flag Options
- [Peer reviewed]
- [News]
- [Discussion]
List of potential predatory journals & publishers (do not post from these sources)
I’m not on 24/7 but I’ll try to update these when I get a chance.
It might be a good idea to make explicit rulings on some of the borderline sources.
If it were me, I would ban ScienceAlert, for example. “A Physicist Reveals Why You Should Run in The Rain” or “NASA Reveals Spooky Eyes in Space, And They’re Staring Straight at You.” They have a lot of good articles, too, but some of it is clearly just stuff for clicks. Psypost is also a little dubious. Maybe if it’s something a scientist in that field would ever read and take seriously, including reliable journalism sources that are talking about science, then it’s good, but if it would be viewed as pop-science clickbait, then we need to talk about it.
These are just ideas. I’m just saying that clarifying by name some of the things near the border, maybe after checking with the community, might be good.
Yeah, Clickbait has no place anywhere, even if the article itself is fine…
I swear to god the next time I see “side hustle” in my Google News feed…
good idea. I’ll add these to an unacceptable source list in the sidebar. Most of the reports have come from posts like that so I think a majority of people would agree with limiting posts from them.
Yeah. If there’s an explicit list, then it’s easy to extrapolate, too, if some source comes in that’s not on the list. I’m sure there will be little disagreements about particular sources, but it’s easier if there’s a clear guideline to follow.