Robbins Library Notes

Last year, I wrote a post about the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), along with one about the Philosophy Research Network. These are great places to find current research, papers, and works-in-progress in a variety of fields, including philosophy, and I have found these sites to be very useful.

Readers who are curious about the SSRN might find this article by Noam Cohen from the New York Times about the SSRN to be of interest. Here is the introduction:

FIRST came the Amazon book rankings, and word leaked out that perhaps some vaunted writers spent more time than you would think checking how popular they were, hour by hour. Then newspapers started tracking the most popular articles on their sites and journalists, it was said, spent more time than you would think watching their rankings, hour by hour.

But would you believe that academics could become caught up in such petty, vain competition? Of course, you say. Still, short of hanging out in the stacks at the library and peeking over shoulders, the pursuit of that particular vanity had to wait for the Internet, and the creation of the Social Science Research Network, an increasingly influential site that now offers nearly 150,000 full-text documents for downloading.

Not surprisingly, there are some big questions raised by the SSRN about quality control and the worth of the materials posted therein:

The research network raises the same big questions about what is lost and what is gained by removing the barriers to being heard in the public square. Is music distributed on MySpace, without benefit of a record label’s guiding hand, better or worse? Is journalism helped by the wide reach of bloggers, or hurt as professionalism disappears? Is it good that research that has not been reviewed by peers can be found so easily and looks just the same as gold-star approved work?

Do readers have an opinion on this subject? What do they think of the quality of the materials on the SSRN?
A hat-tip to Bookforum.com for this article.