Scholarpedia: bridging the gap between academic research and public knowledge

Scholarpedia is a reliable
encyclopedia

Research companies and research-oriented academic institutions should encourage their researchers and students respectively to visit Scholarpedia, a general-purpose encyclopedia that deals with topics and issues of a highly academic, scientific, or technical nature. In other words, Scholarpedia is a Wikipedia for sages. Based in San Diego, California, United States, Scholarpedia was established by neuroscientist and researcher Eugene M. Izhikevich. Scholarpedia contributors are renowned faculty and professors of various world academic institutions. Scholarpedia requires its contributors to use their legal names as their usernames, which ensures that Scholarpedia readers can easily identify who edits or curates the articles. Scholarpedia implements something called a digital object identifier, which ensures long-term accessibility and traceability of articles. Scholarpedia implements a piece of software called MathJax to efficiently render equations and formulas.

Scope of topics and issues

Scholarpedia articles notably deal with specific topics and issues that catch the sages' attention, regardless of how uninteresting or "nonsense" the topics and issues may be to most people. And hey, Scholarpedia has a portal dedicated to the sense of touch. As reflected in the portal's introductory article, the world's sages noted that the sense of touch is the most ubiquitous but least noticed method of sensing the external world. An explanation can be that the masses take the sense of touch for granted because the sense of touch doesn't give them the majority of information that they find satisfying; most people acquire trendy information via the sense of vision. But for the sages contributing to Scholarpedia, the sense of touch is a pivotal force because they notice that this sensory method is what drives "bonding" between members of social animal species or gives visually deficient people or creatures crucial information about the world around them. Play is another topic that is taken for granted by most people but has a dedicated Scholarpedia portal. While the adultist world neglects play as immature acts that make no sense whatsoever, researchers notice just how important play is to the development of animals in their juvenile states. Play is particularly important to the human species—Homo sapiens—courtesy of its complex and notoriously underexplored neurologic system.