papr - it’s like tinder, but for academic preprints

As part of the Johns Hopkins Data Science Lab we are setting up a web and mobile data product prototyping shop. As part of that process I’ve been working on different types of very cheap and easy to prototype apps. A few days ago I posted about creating a distributed data collection app with Google Sheets.

So for fun I built another kind of app. This one I’m calling papr and its sort of like “Tinder for preprints”. I scraped all of the papers out of the http://biorxiv.org/ database. When you open the app you see one at random and you can rate it according to two axes:

• Is the paper interesting? - a paper can be rated as exciting or boring. We leave the definitions of those terms up to you.
• Is the paper correct or questionable? - a paper can either be solidly correct or potentially questionable in its results. We leave the definitions of those terms up to you.

When you click on your rating you are shown another randomly generated paper from bioRxiv. You can “level up” to different levels if you rate more papers. You can also download your ratings at any time.

If you have any feedback on the app I’d love to hear it and if anyone knows how to get custom domain names to work with shinyapps.io I’d also love to hear from you. I tried the instructions with no luck…

Try the app here:

https://jhubiostatistics.shinyapps.io/papr/