A response to Hansson and Polk (2018) “Assessing the impact of transdisciplinary research: The usefulness of relevance, credibility, and legitimacy for understanding the link between process and impact”
Post-publication record
Source: Retraction Watch, joined by DOI. OpenAlex records retraction as is_retracted, a boolean over a state space with at least four values, so it cannot express an expression of concern, a correction or a reinstatement; it reports them as false, which reads as “fine”.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hansson and Polk (2018, Research Evaluation, 27/2: 132–44) aim to assess the usefulness of the concepts of relevance, credibility, and legitimacy for understanding the link between process and impact in transdisciplinary (TD) research. However, the article misrepresents some of the ideas in the two main reference articles. It also uses definitions of the concepts it aims to test that are inconsistent with the definitions offered by the reference papers. The methods description is insufficient to know what data were collected or how they were analyzed. More importantly, the effort to understand relationships between process and impact in TD research needs more careful definitions of the concepts outcome and impact as well as more objective ways to assess outcomes and impacts. This letter discusses shortcomings in the article and makes suggestions to improve conceptual clarity and methods for empirically assessing TD research effectiveness.
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
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Metaresearch Domain: Evaluation · Genre: Commentary About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | low |
| gpt | Metaresearch Domain: Evaluation · Genre: Commentary About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Not applicable | low |
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 | 0.054 | 0.229 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.052 | 0.080 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
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".