“Six Degrees of Separation”—Revealing a “Small-World Phenomenon” through a Chemistry Literature Search Activity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this literature search assignment, the concept of six degrees of separation is used to highlight the interconnectivity of research papers. This assignment challenges students to link two papers together only through references. Through this assignment, students get hands-on experience with various library and online literature searching tools, specifically Web of Science’s cited reference search. The assignment also develops students’ ability to comprehend the evolution and communication of scientific information, as well as teaching them how to think critically about information in order to evaluate it, draw conclusions, and follow a logical path of inquiry. Finally, students can be introduced to how citation information is often used (and misused) to evaluate journals, papers, and researchers. [Abstract graphic image is used under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license; see Rosvall, M.; Bergstrom, C. T. Mapping Change in Large Networks. PLoS One 2010, 5, e8694.]
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 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 | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.039 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".