Bibliographic record
Abstract
Traditionally, education in computer science focuses on stakeholders like teachers, undergraduate students, and employers. However researchers also educate themselves about recent results and new subject matters. An important vehicle in this informal, self-education process is reading peer-reviewed academic papers---papers that are also used in the curriculum of graduate-level research courses. Technical writing skills are important in this domain, as well as engaging the reader with interesting text. This paper is a study of academic writing. We study in depth the first sentence used by researchers in opening their academic papers and how this sentence operates to draw the reader in. We use a corpus of 379 papers from a top-tier cybersecurity conference and use qualitative analysis (coding from grounded theory) to create a taxonomy of 5 general types and 14 sub-types of opening sentences. In this paper, we define and illustrate each type through examples, and reflect on what we learned about writing after examining all of these sentences.
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 | 0.021 | 0.135 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.003 |
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".