Understanding the information needs of social scientists in Germany
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT The information needs of social science researchers are manifold and almost studied in every decade since the 1950s. With this paper, we contribute to this series and present the results of three studies. We asked 367 social science researchers in Germany for their information needs and identified needs in different categories: literature, research data, measurement instruments, support for data analysis, support for data collection, variables in research data, software support, networking/cooperation, and illustrative material. Thereby, the search for literature and research data is still the main information need with more than three‐quarter of our participants expressing needs in these categories. With comprehensive lists of altogether 154 concrete information needs, even those that are only expressed by one participant, we contribute to the holistic understanding of the information needs of social science researchers of today.
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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 | 0.026 | 0.046 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".