A Behavioural Approach to Ranking Academic Departments By Prestige: The Case Of Sociology in English-Speaking Canada
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Academic prestige has, due to the 21 st century culture of declining survey cooperation, become harder to measure accurately using reputational surveys. Even if the high nonresponse on a survey of professors were ignorable in terms of bias, the credibility of such a survey would be challenged. Within sociology, citation index counts are not as useful an alternative as in more consensual and article-based disciplines such as economics. Sociologists publish in an immense variety of outlets, with much of the most important work appearing in books. Reported herein is a behavioural approach to academic prestige, based on each department's profile of doctoral origins of staff members (termed a broad by fuzzy approach) and on dominance within the hiring exchange matrix (giving a narrow but clearer reading). The case study is departments of sociology within English-speaking Canada. Academic Prestige, Reputational Surveys, Departments of Sociology, Doctoral Origins, Hirings, Canada.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.056 | 0.113 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it