Expanding Knowledge Landscapes: Supporting Non-Traditional Theses at UCalgary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The prevalence of alternative theses was unknown at our institution. Over two years, a multidisciplinary research team examined examples, support needs, and barriers for graduate students pursuing non-traditional thesis pathways at the University of Calgary. We found that interest in these forms is growing, yet students and faculty often hesitate because processes are undefined, approvals unclear, and institutional supports limited. Our findings point to the importance of early and sustained encouragement, clear messaging that non-traditional theses are accepted, and opportunities to build communities of practice. The library has a key role: connecting students with institutional resources, collaborating with subject librarians to surface examples and engage supervisors, and ensuring repository infrastructure can preserve and share diverse formats. Supporting these needs not only enables innovative scholarship but also broadens what counts as research.
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 | 0.023 | 0.032 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.020 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 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".