The Emergence of Astrobiology: A Topic-Modeling Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Astrobiology is often defined as the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life on Earth and in the Universe. As a discipline that emerged in the past decades of the 20th century, its contours have not always been straightforward, resulting from the interweaving of several lines of research as early as the 1960s. By applying computational topic-modeling approaches to the complete full-text corpus of three flagship journals in the field, Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres (1968–2020), Astrobiology (2001–2020), and the International Journal of Astrobiology (2002–2020), we identify specific topics that characterize the early blossoming of the discipline. We also map their evolution through time, as emphasis changed between different readings of astrobiology, from an exobiology and origins-of-life perspective to a more space- and planetary-sciences view of the discipline.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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.
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".