Promising but Uncertain Work: Inventing and Reinventing the Research Exchange Index (REx)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Research Exchange Index (REx) is a new digital imprint affiliated with the WAC Clearinghouse. Its first publication, REx 1, is the inaugural edition of a searchable database that contains unique, peer-reviewed information about empirical studies of writing conducted between 2000 and the present. The ten-year history of the development of these resources provides insight into digital scholarly publishing in rhetoric and composition/writing studies. In particular, the evolution of REx highlights some of the ways that new modes of scholarly communication triangulate access, rigour, and inclusion within the discipline. A success story of sorts, the history of REx also raises questions about the impact of digital scholarly publishing and its sustainability.
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 | 0.141 | 0.271 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.013 | 0.015 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.037 | 0.072 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.023 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.004 |
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".