MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort

Two simple ways to make taxonomic diagnoses more useful

2024· preprint· en· W4404424689 on OpenAlexaff
Laurence Packer

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typepreprint
Languageen
FieldAgricultural and Biological Sciences
TopicMollusks and Parasites Studies
Canadian institutionsYork University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMedical diagnosisSimple (philosophy)Computer scienceData scienceMedicineEpistemologyRadiologyPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Diagnoses are important aspects of description and identification processes, but they often do not make it clear whether they are useful for a particular specimen. I suggest that diagnoses always be accompanied by overt statements as to what taxonomic group the new taxon is being compared with, and whether it is a geographically, morphologically or ecologically restricted subset. I term the group to which the diagnosis overtly relates the reference group. Further, a paper that provides the features that the reference group must possess has the potential for being more broadly useful. For example, if the reference group is a subtribe but the authors explain how to separate that subtribe from all others in the subfamily, then a user must be able to identify only the subfamily before finding potentially useful information in the paper. I term this often more expansive taxon the recognition group. For 313 newly described insect genera for which diagnoses were provided, I assess the taxonomic level and number of genera in both the reference and recognition groups. The two groups were identical in almost half of the cases, were at the same taxonomic level but geographically or morphologically restricted in less than 9% and at a higher taxonomic level in the remainder. When authors explained how to identify the reference group from a larger recognition group, the number of genera from which the new one could be differentiated increased by a factor of more than four. I make a series of recommendations on how diagnoses can be improved based upon analyses of reference and recognition groups.

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 distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.229
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.002
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.067
GPT teacher head0.289
Teacher spread0.222 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2024
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same topicMollusks and Parasites StudiesFrench-language works237,207