Gerontocracy, labor market bottlenecks, and generational crises in modern science
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
Abstract Many early career researchers (ECRs) currently face long odds of attaining a full-time or tenure-track research position. Populations of graduate and postdoctoral researchers have continually increased, without concomitant increases in tenure-track jobs or stable research careers. The current hypercompetitive academic labor market is societally inefficient and often inhumane to ECRs, commonly characterized by precarious, exploitative, and/or uncertain employment terms. Compounding generational disadvantages endured by many ECRs at work, analysis of worldwide data on housing rental costs reveals that escalating costs of living are an especially acute problem for ECRs, since major research universities tend to be located in expensive cities. The unfavorable plight of today’s ECRs can be partly attributed to the disproportionate zero-sum distribution of resources to senior academics, particularly of the baby boomer generation. The uncertainty, precariousness, and hypercompetitiveness of ECR academic labor markets undermine the quantity and quality of scientific innovations, both in the present and in the future.
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.
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Metaresearch Domain: Incentives · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | low |
| gpt | Metaresearch Domain: Incentives · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Observational | low |
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 | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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