A new category for recommendations of graduate+ level information

Question

Today, polarkernel created a new top-level Q2A category called ''Recommendations''. Under this category users may post links to graduate/research level stuff they are presently reading (or want to read, have just discovered as worth reading, ...) together with a short description of the subject and their reasons why they are recommending it.

The idea is that this should allow (and encourage) you to share useful and/or exciting material even if you don't have easy-to-formulate questions about it and even if you don't know the subject already well enough to write a review.

The standard for the material linked to should be comparable to the standard applied for submitting papers to be reviewed in the Reviews section. But the presentation is considerably less demanding than a review. Some of the posts can perhaps later give rise to proper reviews, when you or another reader mastered the material.

The recommendations are formally posted as questions; subsequent discussion is either in form of comments or answers (depending on the weight of the contribution). Since this is an informal service, there are no reputation gains for upvoted posts in this category.

Edit: The hope is that this category may turn into a democratic version of ''This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics'' of John Baez that made in the early days of the internet sci.physics.research a very lively place. Thus posts should not be restricted to only posting references to papers, but also to useful comments. And not only to mention papers, but also conferences, videos of Nobel price speeches, news about new  particles found at CERN or new planets discovered, or everything else that's worth recommending to graduate students and professionals.

Comments

Shouldn't this rather be a subcategory of Chat, as this was always supposed to be posted to Chat? Adding too many top-level categories seems counter-productive. At the very least there should be a link to it from /chat, /activity/chat, etc. Also, "Recommendations" sounds somewhat vague -- try something like "Interesting Reads" or "Recent papers".

By the way, the News section seems overpopulated. It might be useful to remove the announcement of the personal directory and advanced search.

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@Dimension10 The new category, though less demanding than the reviews section, is meant to contain contributions that are of significant interest to the community and that fully meet the standards and level of PO. As Arnold has described, it might also serve as a way to make the Reviews section more lively in the long run. Its activity therefore appears on the main page and it is meant to help increase the traffic of the site.

Chat on the other hand should not be a dustbin that contains complete garbage of course, but it can (and it did) also allow for some content that is less suitable for appearing on the main page because its level is a bit borderline, its ontopicness is slightly dubious, or it is of interest to an only very limited number of people (instead of to a large part of the community).

Concerning the number of entries in the News, I personally dont feel very strongly about removing some older links (three entries seem still OK to me though), but I would wait a bit to see how other people feel about this.

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@Dilaton Uh, alright, but I think the current category title "Recommendations" isn't clear enough. What about "Worth a mention" or "Interesting papers"?

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@Dimension or "Worth reading" as this would allow the scope to be broader than just papers?

"Recommendations" has the advantage that in principle, also talks, upcoming conferences, etc could be presented.

Thinking about it I am not sure if @Arnold thought that the new category should be dedicated exclusively to reading material?

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@Dimension10: In the news, the ''The reviews section is completed'' can go - it is already over a year old. I think news should be announced on the right panel for 3 months, and then moved to the history (if not already there).

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What is vague about recommendations? Recommend papers, conferences, videos of Nobel price speeches, news about new  particles found at CERN or new planets discovered, or everything else that's worth recommending to graduate students and professionals.

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@ArnoldNeumaier The problem with "Recommendations" is that it sounds like you're requesting recommendations - that was the first impression I had when I saw your question on the main page, and thought it was a half-written question posted to "Resources and Recommendations". "Recommended papers" would probably be better.

I initially thought that "The reviews section has been completed" should stay so as to encourage people to help recategorise submissions. But it hasn't really worked to support the recategorisation, and one of the links is totally outdated (I was under the impression I had updated it earlier) so that's probably alright.

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By the way, the random promotion system is very nice! What's the frequency of bumping? And is the amplitude always 1?

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@Dimension10: For bumping, see http://www.physicsoverflow.org/34791/

We have a category ''Resources and References'', not ''Resources and Recommendations''.