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Record W3173242921 · doi:10.1177/03063127211027662

When citizen science is public relations

2021· article· en· W3173242921 on OpenAlexafffundabout
Sarah Blacker, Aya H. Kimura, Abby Kinchy

Bibliographic record

VenueSocial Studies of Science · 2021
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldEnvironmental Science
TopicSpecies Distribution and Climate Change
Canadian institutionsYork University
FundersSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
KeywordsCitizen scienceSociologyEpistemologyPolitical scienceEnvironmental ethicsBiologyPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

(PRCS). Unlike citizen science and crowdsourcing projects that generate raw materials for product development, PRCS benefits capitalist firms primarily by improving their public image and deflecting accusations of causing harm. Three cases illustrate how PRCS works: (1) a growing assortment of citizen science projects associated with Antarctic tourism, (2) an initiative to document biodiversity, linked to Canada's oil and gas industry, and (3) a study sponsored by Biology Fortified, a nonprofit organization that works to communicate positive information about agricultural biotechnology. Scientists and research organizations may have legitimate reasons for entering into these partnerships, but PRCS can benefit industries in problematic ways. First, by supporting environmental science, PRCS can attach a 'sustainable' image to a polluting industry, without changing its core practices. Second, PRCS can accumulate data and steer volunteers' observations in ways that undermine claims about the harms caused by the industry's practices or products. Finally, in some cases, PRCS organizers hope to induce people to view an industry more 'rationally' than those who make 'emotional' or 'ideological' claims about its harms.

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

Direct model labels (unvalidated)

Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.

Model armCategoriesStudy designConfidence
gemmaScience and technology studies
Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical
About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no
Qualitativelow
gptScience and technology studies
Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical
About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no
Other designlow
models splitAgreement compares identical category sets and study designs across arms.

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)0.032
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.071
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.981
Threshold uncertainty score0.167

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0320.071
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0020.003
Science and technology studies0.0190.045
Scholarly communication0.0350.039
Open science0.0020.025
Research integrity0.0240.026
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0360.006

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 head0.101
GPT teacher head0.331
Teacher spread0.230 · 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

Labeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.

Science and technology studies

The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.

Study designQualitative · Other design
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

Citations31
Published2021
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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