Bibliographic record
Abstract
‘Excellence’ is omnipresent in the research ecosystem but the focus on excellence is increasingly controversial. This paper contributes to the excellence debate through an empirical study of how notions of excellence are used in eight research funding organizations. Because research funding organizations are shaped by the excellence regime, and constrained by both governmental policy and scientific elites, funders cannot simply resort to a debunking critique and do away with excellence altogether. To navigate the ambiguous relationship to excellence, the approach to excellence is shifting from it being taken as a ‘matter of fact’ to a ‘matter of concern’ that needs to be unpacked and reconfigured. In mitigation strategies funders attempt to reconfigure excellence by patching, pluralizing and transforming their activities around excellence. We argue that a transformation of the research ecosystem is unlikely to happen when underlying assumptions about competition and meritocratic ideals are not also problematized.
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 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 | 0.020 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.003 |
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".