Algorithmic Transparency: Concepts, Antecedents, and Consequences – A Review and Research Framework
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The widespread and growing use of algorithm-enabled technologies across many aspects of public and private life is increasingly sparking concerns about the lack of transparency regarding the inner workings of algorithms. This has led to calls for (more) algorithmic transparency (AT), which refers to the disclosure of information about algorithms to enable understanding, critical review, and adjustment. To set the stage for future research on AT, our study draws on previous work to provide a more nuanced conceptualization of AT, including the explicit distinction between AT as action and AT as perception. On this conceptual basis, we set forth to conduct a comprehensive and systematic review of the literature on AT antecedents and consequences. Subsequently, we develop an integrative framework to organize the existing literature and guide future work. Our framework consists of seven central relationships: (1) AT as action versus AT as perception; factors (2) triggering and (3) shaping AT as action; (4) factors shaping AT as perception; as well as AT as perception leading to (5) rational-cognitive and (6) affective-emotional responses, and to (7) (un-)intended behavioral effects. Building on the review insights, we identify and discuss notable research gaps and inconsistencies, along with resulting opportunities for future research.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it