Research resources subforum?

[Parasaurolophus]

A few days ago, in the thread titled 'Polly's thoughts on the future of our community thread', I noted that I think it would be really cool if we had a place (perhaps a subforum of the research forum?) where we could ask Forumites whether they know of any research on some topic we're working on.

There's tons of knowledge here and, crucially, tons of knowledge from across disciplinary boundaries, and it strikes me that this could be a real value-added proposition for the Fora. What do you all think? Yea? Nay?

In case I'm not expressing myself very clearly--I feel kind of foggy this morning--what I have in mind is a dedicated place we can fill with things like nebo113's thread on haint blue or Descartes's recent thread on gender studies and the concept of 'male lesbians'.

I think it would be really cool if we had a practice of asking for that kind of help here, and if we had a dedicated place to do it (especially because I think having such a space would help to encourage building a culture of doing it).

[Morden]

I think that would be a good idea; I enjoyed the haint blue discussion.

[Ruralguy]

Sure, why not!

[polly_mer]

Sure, why not!

People might be reluctant to contribute in their areas as possibly outing themselves.

I will also point out that we don't have a great track record of having the discussion be limited to people who are active in a relevant field and interested others.  I'm still angry about multiple experiences in the past year where my expertise was pooh-poohed because someone else follows the mass media news or has "experise" along the lines of students knowing about teaching because they've spent so much time in classrooms.

[Sun_Worshiper]

I'd be happy to contribute where useful. But I only know about the data and scholarship in a very narrow set of areas, so not sure how often I would be able to help anyone else (for example, I have never heard of male lesbians or haint blue until now).

[Ruralguy]

Many of us speak about fields similar to our PhD field or even the exact subfield without being terribly revealing. It won't be mandatory of course, and we get a big variety of people who reveal nothing up to people who reveal basically everything but name and exact school.

Of course, the downside is that some bozo who knows nothing can profess to be an expert, or even admit to being a bozo, but spout anyway.

[eigen]

I'm all for giving it a shot, sure.

[Parasaurolophus]

What shall we call it, then? 'Research resources' sounds too overgeneral and uninformative to my ears. 'Help With Sources'?

Shrug.