I did the honours of posting the first paper to Citemine. It happens to be a paper about Citemine itself: On the Design and Implementation of a Market Mechanism for Peer Review and Publishing. This paper serves as an example for how Citemine works. For the first month after this paper has been posted, you can bid on the paper (using Citemine’s virtual currency), and I can modify it if I feel it needs to be. We call this month the roadshow period, and you can think of it as an initial review period. Once this month is up, trading begins. A bunch of shares are floated, and any bids that were made during the roadshow period are matched. From this point onwards, you can make bids and asks as you see fit, and, while I can still modify the body of the paper, I cannot alter the authorship of the paper or the list of references. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work! Please let us know if it doesn’t do what you expect by sending us an email.

Now, if my paper were to be cited by many other papers in the future, those holding shares in my paper would receive frequent dividend payments, adding to their bank balance. The share price of my paper should be driven up as demand for shares in my paper increases due to the regular dividend payments. If, on the other hand, my peers collectively decide my paper contains no valuable research contribution and is unlikely to be cited in the future, the price of shares in my paper will be driven down.

Essentially, Citemine works a bit like Google PageRank^™, except instead of waiting for a paper to accumulate a large number of links from other papers before it becomes identified as important, we use the wisdom the crowd (the market) to forecast which papers will receive a lot of citations. We expect this to have the effect of expediting research, since important new work will be easier to find, which is something we hope you will find valuable. Would it be too corny to call this rating SageRank?

In this way, Citemine tracks what the scientific community thinks of any given paper that’s in the system (the paper’s share price), and it also provides a rating for the people who read and write papers – the researchers – in the form of the sum of the value of their share portfolio and their bank balance. Unlike citation counts, h index or g index, the Citemine rating is a direct reflection of how your peers value your work at the present point in time, and how they think your work will be valued for at least a short time into the future. Because of this, Citemine delivers leading or predictive metrics, rather than trailing ones, which are the sort usually used to evaluate a scientist’s publishing reputation. We think this might be of use to funding agencies and employers of researchers. Let us know what you think.