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Record W2169103577 · doi:10.1177/0022002709346253

Estimating War Deaths

2009· article· en· W2169103577 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

VenueJournal of Conflict Resolution · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldHealth Professions
TopicHealth and Conflict Studies
Canadian institutionsSimon Fraser University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBattleEstimationAssertionSpanish Civil WarDemographyPolitical scienceCriminologyHistorySociologyLawEconomicsAncient history

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

In a much-cited recent article, Obermeyer, Murray, and Gakidou (2008a) examine estimates of wartime fatalities from injuries for thirteen countries. Their analysis poses a major challenge to the battle-death estimating methodology widely used by conflict researchers, engages with the controversy over whether war deaths have been increasing or decreasing in recent decades, and takes the debate over different approaches to battle-death estimation to a new level. In making their assessments, the authors compare war death reports extracted from World Health Organization (WHO) sibling survey data with the battle-death estimates for the same countries from the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO). The analysis that leads to these conclusions is not compelling, however. Thus, while the authors argue that the PRIO estimates are too low by a factor of three, their comparison fails to compare like with like. Their assertion that there is “no evidence” to support the PRIO finding that war deaths have recently declined also fails. They ignore war-trend data for the periods after 1994 and before 1955, base their time trends on extrapolations from a biased convenience sample of only thirteen countries, and rely on an estimated constant that is statistically insignificant.

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)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.675
Threshold uncertainty score0.564

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
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 head0.086
GPT teacher head0.454
Teacher spread0.367 · 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