Policymakers' Online Use of Academic Research
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
In addressing the question of how new technologies can improve the public quality and presence of academic research, this article reports on the current online use of research by policymakers. Interviews with a sample of 25 Canadian policymakers at the federal level were conducted, looking at the specific role that online research has begun to play in their work, and what frustrations they face in using this research. The study found widespread use of online research, increasing the consultation of this source in policy analysis and formation. The principal issues remain those of access, indexing and credibility, with policymakers restricting themselves in large part to open access sources. Still, online research is proving a counterforce to policymakers' reliance on a small number of academic consultants as gatekeepers and sources for research. What is needed, it becomes clear, is investigations into whether innovative well-indexed systems that integrate a range of academic and non-academic resources might increase the political impact of research in the social sciences and education.
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.
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 | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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