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Record W3203560016 · doi:10.5195/jmla.2021.1226

Search is a verb: systematic review searching as invisible labor

2021· article· en· W3203560016 on OpenAlexafffund
Amanda Ross‐White

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of the Medical Library Association JMLA · 2021
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
Topicscientometrics and bibliometrics research
Canadian institutionsQueen's University
FundersQueen's University
KeywordsVerbContext (archaeology)Process (computing)Task (project management)NounSelection (genetic algorithm)Term (time)Computer scienceSociologyPsychologyArtificial intelligenceEconomicsHistoryManagement

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Invisible labor is a term used by labor economists to describe work that contributes, and is often even necessary, to the economy but largely goes unrecognized and unpaid. Despite the fact that systematic review searching is a significant task for many librarians and knowledge professionals, the search process can be considered a form of invisible labor because it often goes without recognition. This occurs sometimes through not granting authorship to the librarian who performed the intellectual contribution of search development and sometimes through a devaluing of the search process by the choice of language used to describe the search. By using the term search as a passive verb or noun, authors devalue the real intellectual labor involved in searching, which includes decisions related to search terms and combinations, database selection, and other search parameters. This commentary explores the context of how searching is described through the concept of invisible labor.

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)0.190
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.490
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Scholarly communication
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch
DomainCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.978
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.1900.490
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0030.002
Bibliometrics0.0120.022
Science and technology studies0.0070.061
Scholarly communication0.0220.037
Open science0.0050.013
Research integrity0.0190.011
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.250
GPT teacher head0.527
Teacher spread0.278 · 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 designQualitative
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

Citations13
Published2021
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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