Does Anyone Use Sociology, Other Than Sociologists?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Replication package for study: DOI: 10.1007/s12108-025-09647-5 Does Anyone Use Sociology, Other Than Sociologists? The Interdisciplinary Relevance of ASA Journals, 2000-2023 Soli Dubash University of Toronto Gordon Brett University of Hong Kong Acknowledgements We thank Blair Wheaton, Daniel Gruner, and Leslie Barnes, for their contributions to this study. Corresponding author: Soli Dubash. soli.dubash@mail.utoronto.ca, Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 17100-700 University Ave., Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Authors’ Note The authors contributed equally to this work. Statements and Declarations Funding The research presented in this paper is that of the authors and does not reflect the position of the funding sources. The first author is funded in part by the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program and the University of Toronto. The second author was supported by the University of Hong Kong’s Seed Fund for Basic Research for New Staff. The funding sources did not have any role in the study design; collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; writing of the report; or the decision to submit the report for publication. Computations were performed on the Niagara supercomputer at the SciNet HPC Consortium. SciNet is funded by: the Canada Foundation for Innovation; the Government of Ontario; Ontario Research Fund - Research Excellence; and the University of Toronto. The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose. Conflict of Interest The authors have no competing interests to declare. Availability of data and material Code which connected to the Niagara supercomputer and queries the Web of Science (WoS) database may be available through request to the first author. Code used to process the data and produce the results, alongside scale-free vector files for the figures, can be found on the OSF repository accompanying this study. Due to licencing restrictions involving the terms of use for the raw WoS XML data, we cannot freely share the data used to produce these results. Author CRediT Statement Gordon Brett: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing - review & editing. Soli Dubash: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Software, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing - review & editing. Ethics approval This study uses bibliographic data. No ethics approval was required.
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 | 0.194 | 0.592 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.018 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.221 | 0.093 |
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".