Related papers: Nefarious Numbers
A key feature of questionable journals is a lack of adequate peer review of their articles. Content of thus unknown quality may be utilised by unsuspecting practitioners or incorporated into peer-reviewed research, becoming legitimised. It…
In many longitudinal settings, economic theory does not guide practitioners on the type of restrictions that must be imposed to solve the rotational indeterminacy of factor-augmented linear models. We study this problem and offer several…
This study investigates the viability of distinguishing articles in questionable journals (QJs) from those in non-QJs on the basis of quantitative indicators typically associated with quality. Subsequently, I examine what can be deduced…
The concept of impact is one of the most important concepts in informetrics. It is here studied mathematically. We first fix a topic for which we want to find influential objects such as authors or journals, and their production, such as…
Empirical evidence shows that co-authored publications achieve higher visibility and impact. The aim of the current work is to test for the existence of a similar correlation for Italian publications. We also verify if such correlation…
An exploratory, descriptive analysis is presented of the national orientation of scientific, scholarly journals as reflected in the affiliations of publishing or citing authors. It calculates for journals covered in Scopus an Index of…
Informally, a 'spurious correlation' is the dependence of a model on some aspect of the input data that an analyst thinks shouldn't matter. In machine learning, these have a know-it-when-you-see-it character; e.g., changing the gender of a…
Quantitative characterizations and estimations of uncertainty are of fundamental importance in optimization and decision-making processes. Herein, we propose intuitive scores, which we call certainty and doubt, that can be used in both a…
Uncertainty quantification is a set of techniques that measure confidence in language models. They can be used, for example, to detect hallucinations or alert users to review uncertain predictions. To be useful, these confidence scores must…
We propose a new performance indicator to evaluate the productivity of research institutions by their disseminated scientific papers. The new quality measure includes two principle components: the normalized impact factor of the journal in…
We examine the tension between academic impact - the volume of citations received by publications - and scientific disruption. Intuitively, one would expect disruptive scientific work to be rewarded by high volumes of citations and,…
The replication crisis in social and behavioral sciences has raised concerns about the reliability and validity of empirical studies. While research in the literature has explored contributing factors to this crisis, the issues related to…
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) is a particular form of factor analysis, most commonly used in social research. In confirmatory factor analysis, the researcher first develops a hypothesis about what factors they believe are underlying…
The high fraction of published results that turn out to be incorrect is a major concern of today's science. This paper contributes to the understanding of this problem in two independent directions. First, Johnson's recent claim that…
A variety of fairness constraints have been proposed in the literature to mitigate group-level statistical bias. Their impacts have been largely evaluated for different groups of populations corresponding to a set of sensitive attributes,…
This study investigated the problem of fair classification under Covariate Shift and missing protected attribute using a simple approach based on the use of importance-weights to handle covariate-shift and, Related Features arXiv:2104.14537…
Often information relevant to a decision is summarized in an index number. This paper explores conditions under which conclusions using index numbers are relevant to the decision that needs to be made. Specifically it explores the idea that…
Based on the citation data of journals covered by the China Scientific and Technical Papers and Citations Database (CSTPCD), we obtained aggregated journal-journal citation environments by applying routines developed specifically for this…
This study introduces an approach to estimate the uncertainty in bibliometric indicator values that is caused by data errors. This approach utilizes Bayesian regression models, estimated from empirical data samples, which are used to…
The phenomenon of rankings is intimately related with the government interest in fiscalizing the research outputs of universities. New forms of managerialism have been introduced into the higher education system, leading to an increasing…