Bibliographic record
Abstract
‘High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour.’ That vivid opening to David Lodge’s Changing Places captures how globalization has reached the modern university. We saw in Chapter Four that only 28 per cent of British academics are defined as ‘sedentary’ having never worked abroad. 50 per cent have worked abroad for up to two years. The rest have migrated, moving away for more than two years or coming back after such a long stay abroad. We have fewer sedentary academics than any comparable country, apart from Canada which has an open border with the US. Thirty-six per cent of German researchers are sedentary—and 52 per cent of Italians. Half of research papers by British academics are now co-authored with someone overseas and they are more likely to be cited. David Lodge’s two professors were travelling back to the future: in the Middle Ages Europe’s universities formed a highly integrated international system. The structure of the medieval disciplines was the same across Europe and so were the key texts. There was a common language of scholarship—Latin. Degrees were recognized across Christendom, entitling a teacher to teach anywhere (the ‘Licentiate ubique docendi’). Scholars and students such as Thomas Aquinas or Erasmus moved between Rome, Paris, and Cologne. Now Europe’s Bologna and Erasmus programmes are gradually re-creating levels of integration which our universities achieved in the Middle Ages: we must hope that Brexit does not cut Britain off from this. The Bologna process is not an EU programme: it is an intergovernmental declaration agreed in 1999 which sets a common structure of university study to make it easy for students to move between European countries. Heavily influenced by the English model, it specifies that a Bachelor’s degree takes 3–4 years, a Master’s degree 1–2 years, and a doctorate 3–4 years. Erasmus, by contrast, is the EU programme for promoting student and academic exchanges. It has proved particularly fruitful: over a million babies have now been born to students who met a partner from a different EU country as a result of the Erasmus programme.
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.165 | 0.044 |
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".