Bibliographic record
Abstract
Theory is vital in science, including evolution and ecology, yet is seldom defined. Theory is often amorphously described as anything abstract or mathematical or is simply defined as the opposite of empirical work. By contrast, I explicitly define theory as the formation of testable hypotheses, while defining empirical work as hypothesis testing. This pair of definitions highlights the false dichotomy between theory and empirical work insofar as models, mathematics, and methods do not fall in either category, but instead provide the operational link between theory and empirical work. While multiple hypotheses and auxiliary assumptions may be too intertwined to discern which one is actually falsified by a given data set, hypothesis formation and hypothesis testing are still stalwarts of science. Finally, I discuss the odd structure of theoretical papers and proposals within a tripartite parsing of science composed of theory, empirical work, and math/models/methods.
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 | 0.024 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.051 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.031 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.006 |
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".