Scirate.com is a new experimental website for trying to deal with the information torrent hoisted upon the typical scientist who attempts to keep up with the latest and greatest in his or her research field. The basic idea is for the site to work as a sort of filter for the daily listings of new papers appearing on the internet. In particular, the site is currently set up to work most closely with the arxiv.org a preprint depository which has daily postings of new papers. By adopting the model of such websites as digg.com users can vote for a paper. These votes then influence which papers are displayed in a given listing. As a larger and larger userbase grows, it is hoped that the effect of this voting will allow users to confidently be directed to the most important papers published in each listing. Of course there must always be a group of people who are considering each paper, so the real hope is that the amortized work involved will improve under such a voting system.
One question which is usually brought up is why one should vote for a paper? Do you need to read the paper before you vote for it? Most probably the website will function much like other such social websites: people will vote for papers that they find interesting without having read the paper, but probably after having read the abstract.
