these tools can really help someone to explore and find related things which share the same context or strength of relations.

However, I don’t quite share your pessimism that this might “ruin objective science”, despite the danger of positive/negative rating manipulations, because neither public rating nor anonymous peer review will ever be free of hidden agendas. I believe that every researcher who has gone through the peer review process a few times (as I have) will be inclined to acknowledge this.

A possible alternative to peer reviews and citations as measures of academic credibility could be “implicit reviews” of papers – by measuring the actual “usage” of papers. For example: If a great number of researchers spent a lot of time reading a recently published paper, as opposed to quickly scanning through a paper and then discarding it, this might be interpreted as a sign that this paper has something important to say – long before citations start to appear.

In short, a “Last.fm for research”, if you will. That’s the idea behind Mendeley (http://www.mendeley.com), a project I’m currently working on (together with the former chairman of Last.fm, actually)!

I do like this idea in some ways, but we do have to discuss the implications for academic credibility in terms of the philosophy of science. What is ratest best is not always the best–Consider controversial articles that focus on the anomalies that a theory cannot explain. It may be considered less scientific, but it is also the way we see paradigm shifts in science. There are a million ideas for how to accomplish (or ruin) objective science–And this is one such approach, user voting.

Not a big deal perhaps, as it is one of many tools. Perhaps it is important that we do have many different search sources for this very reason.

Some of them are just alternative interface with additional functionality as HubMed others perform analysis to the data to give better performance and save time like e-lise or novoseek.

Anyway, based on what has been said i see Ologeez more like biomedexperts, scilink or authoratory.

Commenters are totally correct that PubMed alternatives are popping up all over now. One of the originals is CiteUlike, though that is just user submitted abstracts. Dissatisfied with PubMed and Google Scholar, I started development of Ologeez a year and half ago in my spare grad school time before these alternatives existed.

My goal with Ologeez was not only a user driven database, PubMed interface (other databases to follow soon), and an online EndNote/BibTex library, but to create a central database for lab groups to find each other and hopefully collaborate (read: what social networks are supposed to be used for).

I also wanted to create new memes and structure for peer-reviewed literature based on user dictated categories. Getting users involved, instead of just an algorithm based spider crawl, means a recommendation engine could start taking effect as well.

Ologeez also isn’t exclusive to the life sciences. Engineering, business, and social sciences in an academic sense are all included.

Anyway, like most of my research, Ologeez is an experiment, but hopefully a successful one.

Regards,
Jason

@ Derick : Zotero is a Firefox extension that is a bibliography manager, to store references, not an article search engine.

Many life science students and researchers couldn’t live without PubMed, a free comprehensive research database that includes articles related to health and a number of biological sciences. Unfortunately, navigating the intimidatingly massive databas…