COVID-19 Impacts on University Research, Past, Present, and Future: A Case Study at Wilfrid Laurier University
Bibliographic record
Abstract
University research is one of the main drivers of knowledge creation, innovation, and economic development. In this essay, we examine the impacts of the COVID-19 global pandemic on Wilfrid Laurier University’s (Laurier’s) research community. We provide a firsthand account of events and actions taken to support our researchers through this challenging time. We also reflect upon the near-term future and longer-term prospects for the recovery of research at Laurier. Our university’s experience is not unique in either the Ontario or Canadian contexts. We offer this essay as both a historical accounting and a case study of the pandemic’s impact on this sector of Canadian society.
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 | 0.019 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.077 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".