Aestheticscience.net – A website for rating academic papers

Hi all, I made a website similar to Rateyourmusic or Letterboxd for rating and cataloguing academic papers, as well as any other writing on the internet. This website was inspired by a very particular moment during a journal club where a professor I used to work for revealed he categorizes all papers he reads with a numerical rating, immediately leading the entire room to ask what were his five star papers.

What is your favorite academic paper? I made this website because I want everyone to tell me what their favorite paper is, and I am not aware of a website that exists which facilitates this RYM-like experience. You could argue it is anti-scientific to allow anyone to put a paper on some arbitrary scale, but this is my response to a point in intellectual history where it is easier than ever to create analyses and papers which are technically true and correct but feel utterly meaningless. I would like to find papers which are not only technically correct but deeply moving and beautiful on some level, if that is possible. I am not sure how many people share this goal but this website is an attempt to find them if they exist.

The emphasis is on academic writing, but you can also add any other writing on the internet like news articles, blog posts, substacks, etc. If you make an account and search a URL, it will automatically populate a form which ingests that piece of writing into the website and allows you to rate it.

Thanks for reading!