The Potential of Collaborative Document Evaluation for Science

Peer review and citation analysis are the two most common approaches for quality evaluations of scientific publications, although they are subject to criticism for various reasons. This paper outlines the problems of citation analysis and peer review and introduces Collaborative Document Evaluation as a supplement or possibly even a substitute. Collaborative Document Evaluation aims to enable the readers of publications to act as peer reviewers and share their evaluations in the form of ratings, annotations, links and classifications via the internet. In addition, Collaborative Document Evaluation might well enhance the search for publications. In this paper the implications of Collaborative Document Evaluation for the scientific community are discussed and questions are asked as to how to create incentives for scientists to participate.