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Ineffective Bibliographic Search Engines?

2005· article· en· W2127735179 on OpenAlex

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.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueBioScience · 2005
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicWeb Data Mining and Analysis
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsInformation retrievalComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Ivan Valiela and Paulina Martinetto correctly point out the increasing volume of academic literature published yearly and the challenges involved in keeping up to date (BioScience 55: 688–692). It is, however, disturbing to learn only an average of 36 percent of known publications were retrieved from online bibliographic databases. As science librarians, we feel their strategy and findings warrant a response since our knowledge of database search and retrieval may explain their results. First, ASFA and Biological Sciences provide good coverage of aquatic sciences; however, the choice of databases in the group column in table 1 is problematic since it was based upon what was available as opposed to their subject coverage. Better results may have been achieved if subject-relevant databases had been included such as BIOSIS Previews, Wildlife & Fisheries Worldwide, or Selected Water Resources Abstracts, instead of GeoRef, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, and TOXLINE. Second, the variability within databases occurs for several reasons. Databases employ indexing practices which may involve core indexing (full content) or selective indexing (less than 50 percent of the content) of journals. Valiela and Martinetto did not state whether they had verified the level of indexing and coverage of journals by ASFA or Biological Sciences, or if they had verified whether journal titles of unfound publications were indexed at all by the databases. Moreover, the lack of availability of publications prior to 1970 would be expected, considering that ASFA and Biological Sciences were first published in 1971 and 1982, respectively. Given the extensive date range of publications used in the study, the authors could have made the study format independent (i.e., print or electronic) for the publications dating back to the 1940s. This could include the print indexes Biological Abstracts or Zoological Record, as their coverage began in 1926 and 1864, respectively.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.768
Threshold uncertainty score0.468

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.010
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.015
GPT teacher head0.258
Teacher spread0.242 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it