Bibliographic record
Abstract
Teaching our successors about the art of theory building can be a challenge. If you have taught a theory-building course in any of our fields, you may have experienced a common hazard: The seminar can devolve into yet another methods course when the more methodologically inclined take over, focusing the class’s attention on the flaws in tests of our theories. I describe a way of transforming these fault-findings into higher-level learning opportunities by asking a simple question: “So what?” Repeatedly asking questions about whether and how much the faults matter can help students become more thoughtful readers of empirical research by moving them beyond the mechanical application of conventional rules to a deeper appreciation of theory-building processes.
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 | 0.174 | 0.322 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.028 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.022 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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".