Great paper? Swipe right on the new ‘Tinder for preprints’ app | Science | AAAS

"If you’re tired of swiping left and right to approve or reject the faces of other people, try something else: rating scientific papers. A web application inspired by the dating app Tinder lets you make snap judgments about preprints—papers published online before peer review—simply by swiping left, right, up, or down.

Papr brands itself as 'Tinder for preprints' and is almost as superficial as the matchmaker: For now, you only get to see abstracts, not the full papers, and you have to rate them in one of four categories: 'exciting and probable,' 'exciting and questionable,' 'boring and probable,' or 'boring and questionable.' (On desktop computers, you don’t swipe but drag the abstract.) The endless stream of abstracts comes from the preprint server bioRxiv.

Papr co-creater Jeff Leek, a biostatistician at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, released an earlier version of Papr late last year but only started publicizing the app on social media earlier this month after his colleagues added a few more features, including a recommendation engine that suggests studies based on your preferences, an option to download your ratings along with links to the full preprints on bioRxiv, and suggestions for Twitter users with similar tastes as yours.

The goal is to help researchers navigate the overwhelming number of new papers and uncover interdisciplinary overlap, Leek says. Scientists already use social media to discover new papers, he says; Papr aims to simplify that process and capture people’s evaluations along the way. Other preprint servers could be added later, he says."