Bibliographic record
Abstract
Editor—It is a good idea for people to be informed about health matters, to take more responsibility for their health, and to realise the benefits and limits of medicine.1 Whether it is a good idea to try to accomplish this through altering the format and content of the BMJ is another matter. I think that the BMJ is first and foremost a trade paper, and its primary purpose should be to educate and inform practitioners of that trade. I also think that the reason why it is read outside the profession is because of the characteristics that make it a successful trade paper: the quality and detail of its articles, which arise out of who they are aimed at—namely, the medical profession. Changes to the content and format to appeal to a broader readership, whether for the reasons proposed by Eaton in her editorial or simply to increase sales, would, I think, diminish the journal, making it of less use to its primary readership and ultimately unsatisfying also for the non-professionals who choose to read it. An analogy with another trade may seem odd but may have some usefulness. I am interested in cinema and occasionally read trade magazines such as Variety. Many articles in the magazine are abstruse or irrelevant to someone outside the film business, but some are of interest, and the film reviews are excellent. The reason for this is that the reviews are aimed at a specific audience which needs to know an unglossed assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of a film. If the editors of Variety decided to change the format to appeal to a broader audience they would probably have to remove articles of relevance to those in the trade to make room for more lightweight, “moviegoer friendly” articles and reviews. In the process the paper would become less authoritative and so of less use to those in the trade and of less interest to outside readers who want to know more about films and the film business than can be found in the general press. The same thing might happen if the changes of the proposed theme issue of the BMJ were to be adopted. If the editors at the BMJ are set on doing this, by all means let us see the result, but it seems that some of the suggestions for articles (a celebrity interview) do not sound very inspiring.
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 | 0.006 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.017 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.122 | 0.069 |
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".