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Record W3203399286 · doi:10.1111/jep.13622

Rethinking researcher bias in health research

2021· article· en· W3203399286 on OpenAlexaff
Stephen Buetow, Kristina Zawaly

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice · 2021
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldHealth Professions
TopicEthics in medical practice
Canadian institutionsInuit Tapiriit KanatamiFirst Nations University of Canada
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSituatedPrejudice (legal term)PsychologyTransparency (behavior)SubjectivitySocial psychologyEpistemologyPolitical scienceComputer scienceLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Bias is an ambiguous term, defined in different ways. In conventional usage, it indicates unwarranted prejudice. However, in health research, the notion that bias is invariably bad is biased. Although research bias is an error that is always harmful, researcher bias is a tendency to think in a particular way that may obscure or illuminate attempts to address research questions. Researcher bias begins with pre-judgements whose continuing evaluation infuses the subjectivity of researchers as persons who are socially situated in health sciences focusing on human subjects. Two sets of conditions can make this bias in health researchers useful. The first is volume control. Researchers can vary the loudness of their own and other voices in different research environments. The second condition is smart working. It balances researcher bias against analytic thinking to work creatively with irregularity and uncertainty. Thus, health researchers need to bring their biases to consciousness. A dialectical approach can then engage the biases as conversational partners to innovate health policy that is informed by principles including transparency, good faith and tolerance. Less critical than whether researchers are biased is whose interests their bias serves given their positionality and role.

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)0.763
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.745
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch
DomainCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.237
Threshold uncertainty score0.293

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.7630.745
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0020.003
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0060.005
Bibliometrics0.0130.010
Science and technology studies0.0160.224
Scholarly communication0.0430.069
Open science0.0150.032
Research integrity0.0300.062
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.002

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.

Opus teacher head0.920
GPT teacher head0.799
Teacher spread0.121 · 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; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
DomainMethods
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

Citations20
Published2021
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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