Resonance and Current Relevance of IRRODL Highly-Cited Articles: An Integrative Retrospective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper provides an integrative-retrospective analysis of highly-cited articles from past issues of the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning (IRRODL). Download metrics of published articles were used to identify the top 100 downloaded IRRODL articles from 2000–2020. Publicly-available citation metrics for the top 100 articles were used to further refine the analysis and identify the top 10 most-cited IRRODL articles. These articles were then categorized into resonant themes to frame a discussion of the key topics in present-day online and distributed learning research and pedagogy. This paper is intended to provide a broad overview and will be of interest to those who are new to the field of online learning.
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 | 0.035 | 0.185 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.080 | 0.055 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
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".