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Record W3019376897 · doi:10.1136/medethics-2020-106127

In the name of science: animal appellations and best practice

2020· article· en· W3019376897 on OpenAlexaff
Jessica du Toit

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Medical Ethics · 2020
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldVeterinary
TopicAnimal testing and alternatives
Canadian institutionsWestern University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMistakeExtant taxonPsychologyAnimal cognitionAnimal welfareEmpathyEpistemologySocial psychologyPolitical scienceCognitionBiologyLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

BACKGROUND: The practice of giving animal research subjects proper names is frowned on by the academic scientific community. While researchers provide a number of reasons for desisting from giving their animal subjects proper names, the most common are that (1) naming leads to anthropomorphising which, in turn, leads to data and results that are unobjective and invalid; and (2) while naming does not necessarily entail some mistake on the researcher's part, some feature of the research enterprise renders the practice impossible or ill-advised. OBJECTIVES: My aim is to assess whether the scientific community's attitude towards naming animal research subjects is justified. That is, I wish to consider whether the practice of naming animal research subjects is good or bad for the purposes of scientific research. METHOD: After reviewing the extant literature, I constructed a list of the main arguments researchers provide for desisting from naming their animal research subjects. I then analysed these arguments, with a view to determining whether they in fact provide good reasons to avoid naming animal research subjects. CONCLUSION: of researchers giving their research animals proper names. This is because the practice usually leads to greater empathy and so to improved animal well-being. This, in turn, leads to better animal science. Thus, the scientific community's attitude towards naming animal research subjects is not justified.

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 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)0.007
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.046
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.318
Threshold uncertainty score0.962

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0070.046
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.002
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 head0.337
GPT teacher head0.524
Teacher spread0.186 · 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

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations3
Published2020
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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