Bird is the word – on the importance of ethical and effective scientific communication
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Back in 1963, the proto-punk band The Trashmen released the single Surfin’ bird (written by Frazier, White, Harris & Wilson Jr. and released in November 1963 by Garrett label; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZThquH5t0ow ). Fifty years later and despite the obscure lyrics, the song remains iconic in western pop culture; e.g. through the recurrent appearance in the TV show Family Guy (e.g. I dream of Jesus episode, released on 5 October 2008; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WNrx2jq184 ). It is thought that the line ‘everybody knows that the bird is the word’ was inspired by a highly successful and catchy radio jingle released/commissioned in post prohibitionist USA by the Gallo brothers to boost the sales of their inexpensive fortified Thunderbird wine: ‘What's the word? Thunderbird’ ( http://www.absurdintellectual.com/2009/06/05/everybodys-heard-that-the-bird-is-the-word-but-its-not-what-they-think/ ). This illustrates how a simple and catchy message can have a profound and long-lasting influence on society.
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 | 0.042 | 0.057 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.115 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.028 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.024 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.005 |
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".