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Record W2187932946 · doi:10.1186/s40697-015-0087-0

A Basic Scientist's Reflections on Research Funding

2015· article· en· W2187932946 on OpenAlexafffundabout
Katalin Szászi

Bibliographic record

VenueCanadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease · 2015
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicHealth and Medical Research Impacts
Canadian institutionsUniversity of TorontoSt. Michael's Hospital
FundersCanadian Institutes of Health ResearchKidney Foundation of Canada
KeywordsIvory towerSalaryTechnicianPublic relationsWork (physics)MedicinePolitical scienceSociologyMedical educationLawEngineering

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Scientists are among the most enthusiastic people when it comes to talking about their work. Despite this, it seems that it is the funding system that Canadian scientists most often discuss these days, and not their findings and new ideas. Needless to say, research can only exist with good and secure funding, but when obtaining funding becomes a dominant part of investigators’ activity, the system has a problem. I am a cell biologist and physiologist recruited to Canada from Hungary. Generous funding helped me to complete my post-doctoral training here and to start my own lab a decade ago. The transition from post-doc was smoothened by one of the last Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Senior Research Fellowships that gave 2 years of post-doctoral funding and 2 years of new investigator salary support. I was extremely lucky to have this opportunity, which is no longer available to current post-docs. However, as my independent work started to produce results, I had to realize how difficult it was to maintain even a modestly sized lab (one technician and two students) within a research institute. As the reality of inevitable rejections of first grant renewal applications set in, I was swept away by the struggle for funding and the never-ending cycles of reviewing. This experience, shared by many of us, shaped my views on the ills of the Canadian biomedical research funding system. I am sharing my thoughts on this important and complex topic, with the hope that it will be part of a fruitful discussion.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.170
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.249
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: Incentives · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.938
Threshold uncertainty score0.900

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.1700.249
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.003
Bibliometrics0.0030.005
Science and technology studies0.0270.036
Scholarly communication0.0350.031
Open science0.0090.021
Research integrity0.0440.090
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.003

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 head0.487
GPT teacher head0.548
Teacher spread0.061 · 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

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
DomainIncentives
GenreCommentary

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".

Quick stats

Citations5
Published2015
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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