Purpose: It has become increasingly likely that Large Language Models (LLMs) will be used to score the quality of academic publications to support research assessment goals in the future. This may cause problems for fields with competing paradigms since there is a risk that one may be favoured, causing long term harm to the reputation of the other. Design/methodology/approach: To test whether this is plausible, this article uses 17 ChatGPTs to evaluate up to 100 journal articles from each of eight pairs of competing sociology paradigms (1490 altogether). Each article was assessed by prompting ChatGPT to take one of five roles: paradigm follower, opponent, antagonistic follower, antagonistic opponent, or neutral. Findings: Articles were scored highest by ChatGPT when it followed the aligning paradigm, and lowest when it was told to devalue it and to follow the opposing paradigm. Broadly similar patterns occurred for most of the paradigm pairs. Follower ChatGPTs displayed only a small amount of favouritism compared to neutral ChatGPTs, but articles evaluated by an opposing paradigm ChatGPT had a substantial disadvantage. Research limitations: The data covers a single field and LLM. Practical implications: The results confirm that LLM instructions for research evaluation should be carefully designed to ensure that they are paradigm-neutral to avoid accidentally resolving conflicts between paradigms on a technicality by devaluing one side's contributions. Originality/value: This is the first demonstration that LLMs can be prompted to show a partiality for academic paradigms.
This paper explores the use of large language models (LLMs) as research tools in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS). LLMs are remarkably effective at processing unstructured text and inferring meaning from context, offering new affordances that challenge long-standing divides between computational and interpretive methods. This raises both opportunities and challenges for HPSS, which emphasizes interpretive methodologies and understands meaning as context-dependent, ambiguous, and historically situated. We argue that HPSS is uniquely positioned not only to benefit from LLMs' capabilities but also to interrogate their epistemic assumptions and infrastructural implications. To this end, we first offer a concise primer on LLM architectures and training paradigms tailored to non-technical readers. We frame LLMs not as neutral tools but as epistemic infrastructures that encode assumptions about meaning, context, and similarity, conditioned by their training data, architecture, and patterns of use. We then examine how computational techniques enhanced by LLMs, such as structuring data, detecting patterns, and modeling dynamic processes, can be applied to support interpretive research in HPSS. Our analysis compares full-context and generative models, outlines strategies for domain and task adaptation (e.g., continued pretraining, fine-tuning, and retrieval-augmented generation), and evaluates their respective strengths and limitations for interpretive inquiry in HPSS. We conclude with four lessons for integrating LLMs into HPSS: (1) model selection involves interpretive trade-offs; (2) LLM literacy is foundational; (3) HPSS must define its own benchmarks and corpora; and (4) LLMs should enhance, not replace, interpretive methods.
L. Filipe O. Costa, Francisco Frutos-Alfaro, José Natário
et al.
In a recent paper we discussed when it is possible to define reference frames nonrotating with respect to distant inertial reference objects (extension of the IAU reference systems to exact general relativity), and how to construct them. We briefly review the construction, illustrating it with further examples, and caution against the recent misuse of zero angular momentum observers (ZAMOs).
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)—such as abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction before age 18—pose substantial risks to individual health and well-being throughout life, but relatively less research has examined how ACEs are associated with parenting behaviors or children’s home environments. We use linked mother–child data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, a U.S. longitudinal cohort study, to investigate how maternal ACEs are associated with the emotional support and cognitive stimulation of children. Regression results demonstrate an inverse relationship between maternal ACE exposure and the degree of emotional support and cognitive stimulation in children’s home environments. Children born to mothers with four or more ACEs had, on average, 4.9 percentile-unit lower emotional support scores and 5.6 percentile-unit lower cognitive stimulation scores relative to mothers with no ACE exposure, net of maternal and child sociodemographic characteristics. Further results document the importance of emotional neglect and physical abuse, both of which were independently and negatively related to the emotional support and cognitive stimulation of children. Our article builds on a growing body of literature by documenting links between maternal ACE exposure and children’s home environments and by illuminating the lengthy intergenerational reach of parental ACEs.
Community detection is one of the most popular researches in a variety of complex systems, ranging from biology to sociology. In recent years, there’s an increasing focus on the rapid development of more complicated networks, namely multilayer networks. Communities in a single-layer network are groups of nodes that are more strongly connected among themselves than the others, while in multilayer networks, a group of well-connected nodes are shared in multiple layers. Most traditional algorithms can rarely perform well on a multilayer network without modifications. Thus, in this paper, we offer overall comparisons of existing works and analyze several representative algorithms, providing a comprehensive understanding of community detection methods in multilayer networks. The comparison results indicate that the promoting of algorithm efficiency and the extending for general multilayer networks are also expected in the forthcoming studies.
Age-period-cohort (APC) analysis has a long, controversial history in sociology and related fields. Despite the existence of hundreds, if not thousands, of articles and dozens of books, there is little agreement on how to adequately analyze APC data. This article begins with a brief overview of APC analysis, discussing how one can interpret APC effects in a causal way. Next, we review methods that obtain point identification of APC effects, such as the equality constraints model, Moore-Penrose estimators, and multilevel models. We then outline techniques that entail point identification using measured causes, such as the proxy variables approach and mechanism-based models. Next, we discuss a general framework for APC analysis grounded in partial identification using bounds and sensitivity analyses. We conclude by outlining a general step-by-step procedure for conducting APC analyses, presenting an empirical example examining temporal shifts in verbal ability.
Resumo: O objetivo deste artigo é analisar como o rodoviarismo tornou-se um elemento nevrálgico no conjunto da política brasileira na primeira parte do chamado período de democratização, entre a queda do Estado Novo, em outubro de 1945, e o término do governo provisório de Nereu Ramos, em 1956. Ancorado na teoria de Nunes ( 1997 ) das novas gramáticas políticas nas relações entre Estado e sociedade a partir do Estado Novo (1937-1945) e em farta pesquisa empírica, procura-se demonstrar que a força política adquirida pelos agentes do rodoviarismo dependeu, em última instância, do papel assumido pelo Departamento Nacional de Estradas de Rodagem (DNER), que a todo custo buscou manter um grau substancial de “insulamento burocrático” diante da conturbada conjuntura política da época.
Research on entrepreneurship has flourished in recent years and is evolving rapidly. This article explores the history of entrepreneurship research, how the research domain has evolved, and its current status as an academic field. The need to concretize these issues stems partly from a general interest in defining the current research domain and partly from the more specific tasks confronting the prize committee of the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research. Entrepreneurship has developed in many sub-fields within several disciplines—primarily economics, management/business administration, sociology, psychology, economic and cultural anthropology, business history, strategy, marketing, finance, and geography—representing a variety of research traditions, perspectives, and methods. We present an analytical framework that organizes our thinking about the domain of entrepreneurship research by specifying elements, levels of analysis, and the process/context. An overview is provided of where the field stands today and how it is positioned relative to the existing disciplines and new research fields upon which it draws. Areas needed for future progress are highlighted, particularly the need for a rigorous dynamic theory of entrepreneurship that relates entrepreneurial activity to economic growth and human welfare. Moreover, applied work based on more careful design as well as on theoretical models yielding more credible and robust estimates seems also highly warranted.
Translated into English for the first time, Luhmann’s modern classic, Organization and Decision, explores how organizations work; how they should be designed, steered, and controlled; and how they order and structure society. Luhmann argues that organization is order, yet indeterminate. In this book, he shows how this paradox enables organizations to embed themselves within society without losing autonomy. In developing his autopoietic perspective on organizations, Luhmann applies his general theory of social systems by conceptualizing organizations as self-reproducing systems of decision communications. His innovative and interdisciplinary approach to the material (spanning organization studies, management and sociology) is integral to any study of organizations. This new translation enables researchers and graduate students across the English-speaking world to access Luhmann’s ideas more readily.
Complexifying space time has many interesting applications, from the construction of higher dimensional unification, to provide a useful framework for quantum gravity and to better define some local symmetries that suffer singularities in real space time. In this context here spacetime is extended to complex spacetime and standard general coordinate invariance is also extended to complex holomorphic general coordinate transformations. This is possible by introducing a non Riemannian Measure of integration, which transforms avoiding non holomorphic behavior . Instead the measure transforms according to the inverse of the jacobian of the coordinate transformation and avoids the traditional square root of the determinant of the metric $\sqrt{-g}$. which is not globally holomorphic , or the determinant of the vierbein which is sensitive to the vierbein orientations and not invariant under local lorentz transformations with negative determinants. A contribution to the cosmological term appears as an integration constant in the equations of motion. A proposed action for Finsler geometry, which involves $-g$ rather than $\sqrt{-g}$ will also constitute an example of a Holomorphic General Coordinate Invariant Modified Measure Gravitational Theory.
Paulo Duarte, Cristina Estevão, Ana María Campón-Cerro
et al.
The hospitality and travel sector has been one of the most affected sectors by Covid-19, which has resulted in a significant increase in the literature addressing the impact of the health crisis on tourism activities and tourists’ perceptions and behaviours. Traditionally, socio-demographic variables have been instrumental in understanding consumers’ needs and desires. However, during the pandemic, it has been unveiled that social and economic profiles have started to influence how tourists make decisions. Since studies on the changes in hotel choice during and after Covid-19 are still scarce, this article aims to assess the influence of socio-demographic variables on hotel choice based on data collected during the peak phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. A quantitative study was conducted using an online questionnaire that reached an international sample of 1113 individuals. The ANOVA and the t-test analysis results point out that socio-demographic variables under study are responsible for several differences in the evaluation of hotels. These findings reinforce socio-demographic attributes’ capability to understand customers’ preferences and decision-making despite the context.
This article builds upon a multilevel theory of trust to explore the relationship between general trust in health care systems and general trust in physicians and the social-contextual factors that shape this relationship. We develop a model of trust in physicians emphasizing the embeddedness of individuals in broader social-institutional contexts. We analyze data from 30 countries in the 2011 International Social Survey Program ( N = 38,068) and specify hierarchical linear models with macro-micro level interactions. At the individual level, we find that individuals who trust the health care system are more likely to trust physicians in general. At the country level, we find that respondents from countries with predominately publicly financed health care systems are more likely to trust physicians than their counterparts in countries with less public funding of the health care system. Finally, we find that the greatest predicted probability of trust in physicians is found among individuals who trust their publicly funded health care system and the lowest probability is among individuals who have no confidence in their privately funded health care system. Based on these findings, we call for greater attention to the interaction of micro- and macro-level factors in models of trust in physicians cross-nationally.
En este artículo se exploran las razones que esgrime públicamente el neoconservadurismo para promover su agenda moral articulada con agendas neoliberales. Se analizaron las propuestas de partidos políticos “pro-vida”/“pro-familia” en Chile, Brasil, Argentina y Perú, y contenidos producidos por divulgadoras/es de ideas neoconservadoras en Sudamérica. Se proponen tres categorías que sintetizan los principales modos en que se realiza la articulación neoconservadora-neoliberal: un “ensamble funcional” que entiende que la tradición es funcional al orden del mercado y la libertad; un “ensamble subsidiario” que entiende que la retirada del Estado implicaría un fortalecimiento de instituciones subsidiarias, como la familia patriarcal, y un “ensamble defensivo” que asume que toda intervención estatal, incluidos los derechos sexuales y reproductivos, responde a una agenda neo-marxista.