Last month, we beta tested abstract “commenting” functionality on all abstracts in our Cognitive Science Network (CSN). With the initial success and positive feedback, we added the functionality to all abstracts in our Entrepreneurship Research and Policy Network (ERPN). This feature expands the possibilities and conversations based on scholarly research in the SSRN eLibrary. We will add commenting to all abstract pages later this year.

What’s next? – SSRN status updates or Super Poke – we don’t know but we are having fun.

CSN commenting Box

As part of “narrowing the distance” between authors and readers, we are beta testing “commenting” on all public abstract pages in our Cognitive Science Network.  As I said in a previous post, “…as scholarly research has moved from a model of scarcity to one of information overabundance, content is no longer king. The conversation that surrounds the content is king…” The commenting functionality launched this week allows our readers to leave comments for the author and other readers on the abstract’s web page.  We hope this functionality provides a simple forum for hundreds of conversations based on scholarly research in the SSRN eLibrary.  Commenting will be available on all public abstract pages later this year.

We are always announcing new Research Paper Series, Subject Matter eJournals, and other additions to the SSRN site. So, we thought it might be useful to include a weekly round-up each Thursday.

Here are the latest announcements from SSRN:

Bloomberg ALPHA Research & Education Research Paper Series

View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/BloombergALPHA-RES.html
Subscribe: http://hq.ssrn.com/jourInvite.cfm?link=BloombergALPHA-RES

The Bloomberg ALPHA Research and Education Paper Series covers all subjects of interest for quantitative risk and portfolio management. The series is divided into Classroom and Frontiers. Classroom articles revisit well-established results under a consistent, highly rigorous, yet fully digest-able perspective. Frontiers articles explore new territories.
In particular, the first issue of this series covers the Black-Litterman methodology, its enhancements, and its generalizations. (View full announcement)

9th Conference on Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language (CSDL9) Online Proceedings

View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/9th-CSDL-2008.html

CSDL features presentations in the fields of cognitive linguistics, functional linguistics, discourse, corpus linguistics, and speech & language processing by scholars exploring the interface between language and cognition. The theme of CSDL 9 is “Meaning, Form, and Body.” The focus is on two central, related research areas in the study of language:

1. The integration of form and meaning, and
2. Language and the human body.

These topics intersect naturally, as in the study of grammatical constructions, of conceptual integration, and of gesture. (View full announcement)

ERN Randomized Social Experiments Abstracting eJournal

View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Randomized-Social-Experiments.html
Subscribe: http://hq.ssrn.com/jourInvite.cfm?link=Randomized-Social-Experiments

Randomized Social Experiments includes, but is not limited to, field studies of social programs in which the behavior of individuals, households, or (in rare instances) firms or organizations is examined subject to a protocol which includes:

1. Random assignment: Creation of at least two groups of human subjects who differ from one another by chance alone;
2. Policy intervention: A set of actions ensuring that different incentives, opportunities, or constraints confront the members of each of the randomly assigned groups in their daily lives;
3. Follow-up data collection: Measurement of various outcomes for members of each group; and
4. Evaluation: Application of statistical inference and informed professional judgment about the degree to which the policy interventions have caused differences in outcomes between the groups.

Randomized Social Experiments will also contain information on certain studies that would be excluded from the above definition because they do not involve social policy interventions, and therefore expands on the Digest. (View full announcement)