The Most Select and the Most Democratic: A Century of Science in the Royal Society of Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper is a history of the Science Academy of the Royal Society of Canada, from its foundation in 1882 until the early 1990s. The RSC has always had an honorific role, but it has sought a more substantive one in scientific publication (a role that it has largely lost to the National Research Council and to other scientific societies and journals), in educating the public, in reperesenting Canada internationally, and in undertaking scientific inquiries of public import, for example in assessing the risks associated with nuclear winter, or in the Canadian Global Change Program. Often, Fellows of the RSC have individually achieved more in science than the Society has achieved institutionally but as this narrative shows, the dynamic between science, government, the RSC, and the Canadian public, has been important in Canadian science and in Canadian history.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.049 | 0.105 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.034 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".