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Record W4406150311 · doi:10.1111/tran.12740

No national research assessment here. A Canadian counterfactual?

2025· article· en· W4406150311 on OpenAlexaffabout
Trevor J. Barnes

Bibliographic record

VenueTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
TopicEvaluation and Performance Assessment
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNeoliberalism (international relations)Counterfactual thinkingSubject (documents)Political scienceState (computer science)Public administrationGovernment (linguistics)LawPsychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Canada has never established a national research assessment exercise for its post‐secondary institutions. This is a consequence of Canada's nineteenth century legal foundation as an independent nation‐state that made higher education a provincial rather than a federal responsibility. In this sense, the experience of Canada over the past four decades makes a counterfactual to the many countries that implemented national research assessments during the same period. Nonetheless, there have been sharp criticisms of the distribution of federal government research monies among researchers in Canadian universities and colleges. These criticisms are discussed along with the effects on Canadian higher education of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is often identified as a cause of national research assessments. However, Canada is the seeming paradox of having its post‐secondary institutions subject to neoliberalism but not subject to national research assessments.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.158
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.330
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: Evaluation · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.947
Threshold uncertainty score0.837

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.1580.330
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0030.003
Bibliometrics0.0040.008
Science and technology studies0.0080.013
Scholarly communication0.0130.006
Open science0.0060.006
Research integrity0.0070.009
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0170.001

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 head0.132
GPT teacher head0.474
Teacher spread0.342 · 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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
DomainEvaluation
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

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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