Assessing the Extent that the Gender and STEM Practice- Oriented Literature is Evidence-Based
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One principal way to judge if the activity or program described in a practice-oriented publication is worth replicating is to consider the strength of its foundational component. A strong foundational component supports the credibility of an initiative by demonstrating that it was designed with an understanding of other similar initiatives and with evidence that there was a reasonable promise that the desired outcomes were realistically achievable. This paper reports on the findings of a mixed methods content analysis of 142 practice-oriented articles published in three different refereed venues between 1995 and 2009. A scale to measure the quality of the foundational component of the practice-oriented publications was used in the quantitative phases to test if there had been a change in the relative number and quality of practice-oriented publications over time. The validity of the scale was tested in subsequent qualitative phases of the project by an inductive examination of the characteristics of top-scoring articles. Results of the quantitative analysis indicated that the average quality rating of the foundational element of the articles was relatively low (3.37 out of a possible 6 points). The scale proved effective in distinguishing articles that were exemplary in other ways as well. The low overall quality score on the foundational component of practice-oriented publications either means that the authors of these publications are failing to provide ample documentation that these initiatives were evidence-based or the content analysis reveals a long-standing trend toward the adoption of non-evidence based practices.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".