Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting is working on a post aggregation system.

The idea is that you add a icon to your literature review posts and have them show up in a directory of literature posts. Being a clicque-ish but rather non-techy group, the bloggers at Scienceblogs.com are no doubt going to jump all over this, but have they really thought about how it’s going to scale?

It’s important when designing a system like this to show that you’ve considered how your system will interface with existing aggregation systems, such as Technorati tags or Scintilla. It’s just like writing a paper. You have to discuss relevant existing work in the introduction so that people know you’re a part of the research community and have done due diligence to ensure that you aren’t making claims that have been previously refuted and so that you can address contemporary questions in the field. If you’re a newcomer to an area, you wouldn’t publish an answer to some problem without putting your work in context of work done by other members in the field, would you?

I’m not saying that it’s a bad idea. On the contrary, I think it’s a fantastic idea, but I just don’t have any information about the the people involved, and as far as I can tell from their blog, they just assumed no existing solutions were available and decided to do something themselves.

Further evidence that this isn’t a fully-baked solution is that there’s no mention of utilizing metadata such as COinS to describe citations.

It seems to me like it would be easier to just tag your post with “BPR3″ or something sufficiently unique and let Technorati aggregate it, but I can’t say for sure because there’s no explanation of exactly how their aggregation system works. Since they require you to hotlink to the badges on their site(which, unfortunately, was down for around an hour today), I’m assuming that they’re just filtering their referrer logs.

I imagine this will just end up as yet another aggregator of scienceblogs.com posts, which is of some value, no matter how well it’s done, if only it filters out all the political blather from the likes of PZ, Mike, and Nick.