A response to Mike Bender, If Maritime Historians Are in Danger of “being left with their journals and not much else” (Lewis Fischer), What Can Those Journals Tell Us About Ourselves? A Ten-Year Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord 32, no. 4 (Winter 2022), 575-580 A response to Mike Bender, If Maritime Historians Are in Danger of "being left with their journals and not much else" (Lewis Fischer), What Can Those Journals Tell Us About Ourselves?A Ten-Year Study. 1 Hugh MurphyThere are many questionable assumptions in Mike Bender's article.It builds on his previous work in the non-peer reviewed annual publication of the South West (England) Maritime History Society, Maritime South West, of which he is the current editor, described in the article as a "major" journal (p.5).It is not.Whereas, the other three journals sampled, the double-blind refereed, The Mariner's Mirror and the International Journal of Maritime History are leading international journals, the Journal for Maritime Research (editor, Robert not 'Ronald' Blyth) is getting there.I question the statistical validity of a comparison between a non-peer reviewed annual publication from 2009 to 2018 and three peer reviewed (two quarterly, one twice yearly) academic journals.Further, regarding the IJMH, the editorship has recently passed from the University of Hull to the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, so is no longer "British."In his article, Bender does not acknowledge the significance of the centenary issue of The Mariner's Mirror 97, no. 1 (2011), in which I (as hon.editor), published 22 articles in 398 pages from leading scholars (admittedly only one was female, Susan Rose), most of which were surveys of the state of the huge range of disciplines contained in Mariner's Mirror since its inception (including many of the areas Bender states are not published).I set the questions for each individual author and each article was peer reviewed.Of the 22 articles, only six were on naval history.Bender repeats the hoary old cliché that the Mariner's Mirror was too naval.In this he is not alone.My great 1
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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 | 0.013 | 0.078 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.039 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.007 |
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".