> Why don't papers have a big timestamp on the first page?
Something like:
(Received 2 September 2014; revised manuscript received 7 January 2015; published 23 January 2015)
(from the most recent PRB)? arXiv is a bit worse with their non-selectable timestamp on the RHS of the first page, but they have month and year in the ID and a submission history on the paper’s page, so I don’t see much of an issue there.
> Also, I'm wondering why there is no public online discussion forum for scientific papers in general. I would have expected that google-scholar would have filled this gap by now.
The scientific community is sufficiently diverse that it would be difficult to establish one discussion forum. Plus the people whose comments are most valuable would likely be hesitant to comment publicly in writing on their competitors’ papers.
> The scientific community is sufficiently diverse that it would be difficult to establish one discussion forum.
Have a look at stack-exchange. It is a discussion forum for a diverse group of people.
> Plus the people whose comments are most valuable would likely be hesitant to comment publicly in writing on their competitors’ papers.
Well, a forum at least could help people to actually understand the papers.
Also, but this is for the more distant future, the scientific rating system could be extended with a score for the most insightful comments (besides just a score for the number of citations).
Something like:
(from the most recent PRB)? arXiv is a bit worse with their non-selectable timestamp on the RHS of the first page, but they have month and year in the ID and a submission history on the paper’s page, so I don’t see much of an issue there.> Also, I'm wondering why there is no public online discussion forum for scientific papers in general. I would have expected that google-scholar would have filled this gap by now.
The scientific community is sufficiently diverse that it would be difficult to establish one discussion forum. Plus the people whose comments are most valuable would likely be hesitant to comment publicly in writing on their competitors’ papers.