One Scientist’s Struggle to Be a Better Writer, and a Plea for Undergraduate Science-Writing Engagement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In an age where we are saturated with online information, effective communication is more important than ever. Unfortunately, many scientists are ineffective, unskilled, and/or not interested at communicating their research to the general public. Moreover, at some universities, undergraduate science students do not receive adequate training in writing and outreach, thus perpetuating the problem. Here, I recount my own battle to become a better science writer and communicator and how I have tried to integrate public outreach and popular writing into my undergraduate teaching and research.
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 | 0.044 | 0.148 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.032 | 0.027 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.022 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.044 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.006 |
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".