RefSponse: A Literature Evaluation System for the Professional Astrophysics Community

We describe an implementation of a semi-automated review system for the astrophysics literature. Registered users identify names under which they publish, and provide scores for individual papers of their choosing. Scores are held confidentially, and combined in a weighted average grade for each paper. The grade is divided among the co-authors as assigned credit. The credit accumulated by each user (their “mass”) provides the weight by which their score is averaged into papers’ grades. Thus, papers’ grades and users’ masses are mutually dependent and evolve in time as scores are added. Likewise, a user’s influence on the grade of a paper is determined from the perceived original scientific contribution of all the user’s previous papers. The implementation, called RefSponse – currently hosted at http://bororo.physics.mcgill.ca – includes papers in astro-ph, the ApJ, AJ, A&A, MNRAS, PASP, PASJ, New Astronomy, Nature, ARA&A, Phys. Rev. Letters, Phys. Rev. D. and Acta Astronomica from 1965 to the present, making extensive use of the NASA/ADS abstract server. We describe some of the possible utilities of this system in enabling progress in the field. Subject headings: arXiv, peer review, scholarly publishing, scientific publishing