5 What Counts in Research? Dysfunction in Knowledge Creation and Moving Beyond
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Brief History of Journals, Bibliometrics, and RankingsIn 1665, two scholarly entrepreneurs independently seized the potential of the printing press and the postal system and invented the modern scholarly journal.Guédon's (2001) In Oldenburg's Long Shadow presents an overview of the history of the scholarly peer-reviewed journal from its inception in 1665 with Oldenburg's Philosophical Transactions and de Sallo's Journal des Sçavans to the end of the twentieth century.The idea of peer review has evolved over time, but the format of journals has remained largely the same.Odlyzko (1994) predicted the impending demise of scholarly journals.Print and mail are in the process of becoming obsolete as the standard for production and dissemination of scholarly work, as it becomes electronic and web-based.The continuity of the print-based format, with online journals closely resembling print ones, reflects acceptance of the scholarly journal article as the gold standard for publication in many academic disciplines.The growth of scholarly journals and articles since 1665 has been remarkably constant.This was first documented by Price (1963, p. 17) in Little Science, Big Science and updated by Mabe and Amin (2001) and Mabe (2003).There is an average annual scholarly journal and article growth rate of about 3-3.5 per cent per year from the 1600s to the present day.If there were still just two scholarly journals producing a small volume of articles on an annual basis, it would be feasible for every scholar to read every scholarly article.However, as the volume of production grew, journals began to specialize in particular disciplines and sub-disciplines, at rates varying with the growth of the disciplines.As production continued to increase, specialization was not enough.Guédon (2001) argues that the growing numbers of journals was the inspiration for a tendency to want to define "core journals." The purpose of the "core journal" concept was to address two problems that arose as the number of journals grew.One problem was the "serials crisis" documented by the Association of
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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 | 0.057 | 0.061 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.103 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.041 | 0.050 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
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.
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".