Is There Life on Mars? Studying the Context of Uncertainty in Astrobiology
Notice bibliographique
Résumé
While science is often portrayed as producing reliable knowledge, scientists tend to express caution about their claims, acknowledging nuances and doubt, all the more so in novel domains of research paved with unknowns. Uncertainty is an intrinsic aspect of scientific inquiry, particularly in recent fields such as astrobiology, which tackles numerous hard questions about the origin, evolution, and distribution of life on Earth and elsewhere. Mapping uncertainty in science matters for achieving a more accurate understanding of scientific knowledge. It also helps identify research domains at the frontiers of knowledge where unknowns are the most salient. In this article, we investigate the presence, distribution and context of uncertainty in the field of astrobiology. We analyze a comprehensive corpus of 3,698 research articles published in three major journals in the domain from 1968 to 2020. We use a linguistically motivated approach to identify expression of uncertainty in article full text. The corpus was further segmented into research topics using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to investigate variations in uncertainty across subfields and over time. Our findings show that, while uncertainty has remained relatively stable over the 50 years covered by the corpus, constituting 20–25% of sentences on average, it varies significantly across research fields, highlighting areas where unknowns, doubts and speculations are more prevalent. The analysis also highlights relationships between expression of uncertainty and rhetorical structure. Indeed, higher uncertainty levels were observed in the beginning (introductions) and towards the end (conclusions) of research articles, while middle sections contained less uncertainty. Abstracts also tended to express a slightly higher level of uncertainty compared to main texts, especially with greater variability, suggesting their role in summarizing research and highlighting unknowns. To investigate the context of uncertainty, a lexical analysis was conducted to identify nouns most frequently associated with uncertainty within each topic. Terms such as “life,” “planet,” and “Mars” were found to be strongly associated with uncertainty. Conversely, terms related to experimentation and measurement, such as “sample” and “spectrum,” were linked to an absence of uncertainty, pointing at a dichotomy between speculative and evidence-based lines of inquiry. The findings contribute to a better understanding of the field of astrobiology and exemplify the relevance of the proposed method to identify uncertaintyrelated concepts in corpora of full text publications. They also offer a foundation for future comparative studies across disciplines.
Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.
Comment cette classification a été obtenuedéplier
Prédiction distillée sur la base complète
Imitation des enseignantsNi prévalence calibrée, ni vérité terrain. Validation humaine à venir. Apprise à partir de 10 348 étiquettes directes de Codex et de 10 348 étiquettes directes de Gemma. Le mode candidate est l'union des têtes enseignantes seuillées; le consensus est leur intersection. Ces sorties portent le statut machine_predicted_unvalidated et ne sont ni des étiquettes humaines ni des étiquettes directes de modèles de pointe.
Scores Codex et Gemma par catégorie
| Catégorie | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Métarecherche | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens strict) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens large) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Bibliométrie | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Études des sciences et des technologies | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Communication savante | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Science ouverte | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Intégrité de la recherche | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Charge utile insuffisante (le modèle a refusé de juger) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
Scores machine (provisoires)
Les deux têtes enseignantes du modèle étudiant, lues sur ce travail. Un score ordonne la base pour la relecture; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie, et le statut de validation accompagne chaque rangée tel quel.
Scores de référence d'un modèle non mature (critères de maturité non atteints, 7 itérations). Un score ordonne; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · tel quel depuis la passe de notation : score_only signifie que le nombre peut ordonner les travaux, et qu'aucune étiquette de catégorie n'en découleClassification
machine, non validéePrédiction automatique; un appel candidat d’une seule tête enseignante, pas un consensus.
Le détail, modèle par modèle et score par score, se trouve en fin de page sous « Comment cette classification a été obtenue ».