Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Hungarian philosopher of science Imre Lakatos once complained that Thomas Kuhn had reduced scientific research to “mob psychology. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn famously suggested that scientific communities organized their inquiry around particular paradigms of successful research, like Copernicus’ heliocentrism, Lavoisier’s mass chemistry or Faraday’s field theory. Kuhn’s paradigms have a family resemblance with Lakatos’ research programs, so it’s likely not this feature of Kuhn’s account that irritated Lakatos. The irritation was Kuhn’s further suggestion that scientists changed paradigms or research for reasons that were basically arational if not entirely irrational. The community of researchers is guided less by reason and logic and more by a psychological impulse to chase after specific scientific successes or potential successes. This impulse was colourfully described as a “contagious panic.” Whatever the specific merits of Lakatos’ characterization of Kuhn, it would seem difficult to deny that, for better or worse, there is at least a little mob psychology at work in academic research. The recent stampede towards “the Anthropocene” may be an apt example.
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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.003 |
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".