Scientific sleuths come in from the cold

Research integrity investigators are starting to organize, but the field, and the people, remain idiosyncratic

Introducing COSIG: The Collection of Open Science Integrity Guides

Investigating the integrity of published scientific papers is key to the scientific process, but the necessary knowledge is in short supply. We present COSIG, an open collection of meta-scientific guides enabling anyone to perform forensic peer review.

Unequal Scientific Recognition in the Age of LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) are reshaping how scientific knowledge is accessed and represented. This study evaluates the extent to which popular and frontier LLMs including GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro recognize scientists, benchmarking their outputs against OpenAlex and Wikipedia. Using a dataset focusing on 100,000 physicists from OpenAlex to evaluate LLM recognition, we uncover substantial disparities: LLMs exhibit selective and inconsistent recognition patterns. Recognition correlates strongly with scholarly impact such as citations, and remains uneven across gender and geography. Women researchers, and researchers from Africa, Asia, and Latin America are significantly underrecognized. We further examine the role of training data provenance, identifying Wikipedia as a potential sources that contributes to recognition gaps. Our findings highlight how LLMs can reflect, and potentially amplify existing disparities in science, underscoring the need for more transparent and inclusive knowledge systems.

Home | Bellingcat's Online Investigation Toolkit

A toolkit for open source researchers

Magamba Network – We are Africa's trailblazing creative & digital media organisation.

We’re all about using arts, digital media, civic tech & activism to reach young people and get them involved in the big issues of our time. We run some of the most disruptive digital platforms & creative initiatives on the African continent with an online community of over 500,000 young people.

CAIROS | Collective Augmented Intelligence for Research & Open Science

We're a cooperative federation of open science projects working towards collectively stewarded research commons.

Semble

A social knowledge tool for research trails, built on ATProto

How and When to Involve Crowds in Scientific Research | James Evans

The lone academic in a basement lab is an endangered species. Years ago I asked Paul Ginsparg, who founded arXiv, what features his machine-learning filter used to flag speculative submissions. The top three: single-authored, submitted on a weekend, and heavy citation of Newton and Einstein. Science is a contact sport now. Marion Poetz and Henry Sauermann's How and When to Involve Crowds in Scientific Research (https://lnkd.in/g5pwVbfD) is the field manual. What crowds can do: Volume. Zooniverse mobilizes 2.7 million people to classify galaxies and court records. Galaxy Zoo's co-founder hand-classified 50,000 galaxies in one week before concluding that isolation would break him. Reach. NASA spent years failing to predict solar flares, then broadcast the problem. The winner was a semi-retired radio engineer in rural New Hampshire who swapped satellite data for radio data. Experience. Patients and caregivers asked to generate research questions produced 826 that scientists had missed, including the link between aging and wound healing. Bench-to-bedside runs backward. One caution the book underplays: an open call is not an inclusive one. Participation costs in time, money, and access screen people out. Self-selection can narrow the very diversity that makes crowds thrive. As AI floods the labor supply of routine, homogeneous cognition, human crowds become more valuable, not less. Machines process. People notice what nobody thought to ask. Check out my review @ https://lnkd.in/gkzvWrRC and the book @ https://lnkd.in/g5pwVbfD!

Q&A from the slop trenches – GeoSpatial ML

We reviewed 22 ML conference submissions this summer. Fifteen had fabricated citations, hallucinated authors, or clear LLM slop, so we complain about that a bit, and release the paper references audit we now run.

AI for Research | Scite

Scite searches 280M+ scholarly articles to give you citation-backed answers and show you how every claim is supported or disputed.

Exploring ChatGPT usage amongst female academics and researchers in the academia

Purpose. This study aimed to explore the experiences of female academics and researchers in tertiary institutions in South Africa as a means of bridging the gaps in research productivity.Design/methodology/approach. The study adopted a qualitative research design of a phenomenological type to explore the experiences of purposively selected 20 female academics and researchers in a South African University. A semi-structured interview was used to generate data, while NVivo version 14 software was used to code and thematically categorise codes.Findings. The study’s findings showed that female academics and researchers have mixed perceptions about the usefulness of artificial intelligence for their research productivity. While many used ChatGPT to support their research and other scholarly works, others identified the fear of involving in unethical acts that can tarnish their academic integrity as a threat to its usage. Nonetheless, the tool has contributed to their productivity.Practical implications. The outcome of this study is a pointer to the need for educational leaders in tertiary institutions in Africa to upskill academics and researchers' knowledge of the use of emerging technologies for research. Institutions could achieve this through training and peer mentoring.Originality/value. The study is unique because it will call the attention of academics and researchers, especially women, to how the integration of education technologies can help improve both their research and teaching mandate delivery.

Sudan Witness

We expose human rights violations & protect democracy through open-source investigations. We partner with local groups to document war crimes & disinformation, driving real change worldwide.

IPFS (@ipfs.tech)

🪩 Introducing matadisco.org! — a way to discover open datasets via #atproto that doesn't depend on any single institution staying online. 🕺🏼 We have more public data than ever (satellite imagery, climate models, genomic sequences), but finding it is still painfully hard. https://matadisco.org