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Record W3020844025 · doi:10.1177/0268396220911938

Theory building is neither an art nor a science. It is a craft

2020· article· en· W3020844025 on OpenAlexafffund
Suzanne Rivard

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Information Technology · 2020
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBusiness, Management and Accounting
TopicManagement and Organizational Studies
Canadian institutionsHEC Montréal
FundersHEC Montréal
KeywordsCraftPhenomenonIngenuityEpistemologyPerspective (graphical)PatienceComputer scienceQuality (philosophy)Philosophy of scienceProcess (computing)SociologyPsychologyPhilosophyArtificial intelligenceSocial psychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Researchers often hold a romantic view of theory, which they feel should be a complete, flawless, deep, and exhaustive explanation of a phenomenon. They also often hold a romantic view of theory building, which they envision either as emerging from trancelike writing or as the product of a straightforward deductive process. The perspective I offer is more realistic and pragmatic. I espouse the view that the outcomes of a researcher’s theorizing efforts are often incomplete explanations of a phenomenon, which, given a chance, may develop into rich theories. I propose a highly iterative spiral model that portrays theory building as a craft, which calls for care and ingenuity, and requires patience and perseverance. I also propose design principles that can contribute to the quality of the outcome of theorizing.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.110
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.138
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.890
Threshold uncertainty score0.582

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.1100.138
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0020.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.002
Bibliometrics0.0060.005
Science and technology studies0.0090.055
Scholarly communication0.0300.026
Open science0.0060.013
Research integrity0.0050.015
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0090.006

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.

Opus teacher head0.010
GPT teacher head0.226
Teacher spread0.216 · 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
DomainMethods
GenreMethods

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

Citations64
Published2020
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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