Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is a tribute to John Mayne’s work on Contribution Analysis. It focuses on the causal claims Contribution Analysis aims to address, and on how these have evolved since the approach was first published by John in 1999. It first sets out four types of causality with relevance for Contribution Analysis: counterfactual, generative, INUS, and probabilistic causation. It then describes how John integrated the INUS condition and probabilistic elements into the Contribution Analysis approach, followed by how John’s thinking evolved regarding the question of whether the approach could—and should—also address counterfactual questions. The article concludes with observations on how Contribution Analysis can flexibly integrate elements from different causality types.
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 | 0.111 | 0.214 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.024 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 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".