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Record W3005476197 · doi:10.33137/js.v3i0.33559

Method Hierarchies in Clinical Epidemiology

2019· article· en· W3005476197 on OpenAlex
Mathew Mercuri, Hakob Barseghyan

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.

Bibliographic record

VenueScientonomy Journal for the Science of Science · 2019
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicHealth Systems, Economic Evaluations, Quality of Life
Canadian institutionsUniversity of TorontoMcMaster University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHierarchyBlindingSet (abstract data type)Computer scienceRandomized controlled trialMedicineGold standard (test)EpistemologyMathematicsStatisticsSurgery

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Accumulating evidence from diverse fields of inquiry suggests the existence of method hierarchies, where criteria employed by the same epistemic agent constitute a certain preference hierarchy. In this paper, we illustrate the phenomenon of method hierarchy by discussing several prominent studies in clinical epidemiology of coronary artery disease. The current “gold standard” in clinical epidemiology is the randomized controlled trial (RCT) method. Yet, in the absence of studies that satisfy the strict requirement of the RCT method, clinical epidemiologists often relax the requirements of double-blinding, complete follow-up, no treatment switching, and/or randomization. Instead, they sometimes employ less stringent requirements, such as the requirement to account for the potential imbalances between groups through statistical models. This suggests the existence of a certain method hierarchy. However, it is unclear how method hierarchies are to be conceptualized and documented. Specifically, it remains to be seen whether a method hierarchy is best understood as being composed of individual employed methods or as a single composite method with a complex system of if-s and else-s.
 Suggested Modifications
 [Sciento-2019-0013]: Accept the existence of method hierarchies.
 Accept the following definition of method hierarchy:
 
 Method Hierarchy ≡ a set of methods is said to constitute a hierarchy iff theories that satisfy the requirements of methods that are higher in the hierarchy are preferred to theories that satisfy the requirements of methods that are lower in the hierarchy.
 
 Accept the following question as a legitimate topic of scientonomic inquiry:
 
 Conceptualizing Method Hierarchies: should we conceive of a method hierarchy as being composed of individual employed methods/requirements, or should we think of it as constituting one composite method with a system of if-s and else-s, and-s and or-s?

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.419
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.035
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Science and technology studies
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.384
Threshold uncertainty score0.995

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.4190.035
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.003
Science and technology studies0.0010.007
Scholarly communication0.0000.002
Open science0.0030.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.608
GPT teacher head0.589
Teacher spread0.018 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it