Taking Stock of Contribution Analysis: Reflecting on the Past to Inform the Future
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past two decades, contribution analysis (CA) has attracted considerable attention as a theory-based evaluation approach. Over the years, CA has been applied across a broad and still broadening range of settings and contexts. Informed by a comprehensive review of published articles on CA, this article examines the main methodological and theoretical developments of CA. The findings suggest that developments over the past 10 years have focused on methodological improvements and explication of the theoretical foundation for making contribution claims. The authors suggest avenues for further development of CA, including broadening the empirical base of CA applications and developing quality standards for CA.
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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 | 0.221 | 0.270 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.031 | 0.061 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
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; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
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".