I've always struggled with the idea that a news piece is the best way to tell a science story. Sure, it's a tried and tested format for virtually any topic under the sun, but news reports (short, sharp, pithy) are the direct opposite of what scientists have to do when reporting their work (cautious, conservative, laden with caveats).

For me this has always left behind a residual guilt whenever I cover a major story. The complexity of modern science hasn't helped that guilt factor – there might be a dozen potentially interesting lines in a research paper but we can only ever cover one or two in a news article.

The infinite space of the web has helped, of course, by allowing for more detailed reporting, linking to source documents and the ability for readers to comment on how something has been written up. But longer stories are not the best answer, because they still don't reflect how scientific research is done.

Any scientist knows that a paper can only ever be an interim point in the study of a topic and, on publication, it will immediately be dissected and analysed by other researchers all over the world. Readers who are scientists and other interested people might pick up on some of this discussion but, unless you're steeped in a subject, you might miss out.

After the first headlines and news stories summarising the research and instant reaction to it, a casually interested reader might hear nothing about a topic until the next big splashy news story.

Where would you go for that extra analysis? And how would you know what is worth reading?

We're trying out a completely new way of covering big science stories. We believe our coverage of a major research paper should not be done-and-dusted with a single story but form part of a continuum. By tracking reactions and analysis from scientists and bloggers over the days and weeks after a news story breaks, we think the coverage of the story will be richer, more informed and more comprehensive.

Our "story trackers", as we have dubbed them, will allow us to show the wider implications of a piece of research and perhaps follow up the many lines of inquiry that we had to leave out of the original news piece, for whatever reason.

Today's autism research in Nature and our story reporting it seem an ideal testing ground for this concept.

We will need your help to make this work. If you're a blogger, a scientist or just an interested citizen, point us to the best and worst follow-ups you see of the Nature paper. Every day, we will update the tracker with links to the latest reactions and analysis.

If you've been involved in the research and have something to say that you haven't seen reported elsewhere, pipe up. If you're a blogger with an interesting analysis of your own, email us and we'll send readers to your article.

Feel free to tell us if you think anything is wrong with our analysis or that of the people we're linking to.

You can email us directly (guardianscience@gmail.com) or leave a comment on the tracker itself.

This is very much a work in progress and we're unlikely to get everything right first time. Your comments, thoughts and criticisms are all, of course, most welcome.