The Impact of AI on SDG Classifications in Bibliometric Databases: A Conceptual Inquiry into Policy and Research Outcomes
NetSI London talk
Matteo Ottaviani
Postdoctoral researcher at the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) in Berlin
Past Talk
Hybrid
Thursday
Nov 14, 2024
Watch video
12:00 pm
EST
Moretown Room 101, 4 Thomas More St, London E1W 1YW, UK
Moretown Room 101, 4 Thomas More St, London E1W 1YW, UK
Virtual
Moretown Room 101, 4 Thomas More St, London E1W 1YW, UK
177 Huntington Ave.
11th floor
11th floor
Devon House
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK
58 St Katharine's Way
London E1W 1LP, UK
Large bibliometric databases, such as Web of Science, Scopus, and OpenAlex, play a crucial role for policymakers (and decision-makers in general) as they serve as direct and indirect sources for informing decisions both at national and international levels, public and private. Policymakers (or whoever intermediate figure) might benefit from experts who, in turn, formulate their advice relying on information extracted from bibliometric databases. Although the latter facilitate bibliometric analyses, they are performative, affecting the visibility of scientific outputs and the impact measurement of participating entities. These databases have taken up the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in their respective classifications, which have been criticized for their diverging nature. On another end, retrieving and processing information from publications is susceptible to state-of-the-art methodologies. AI-supported and powered tools have recently landed in research practice and society at large. Large Language Models (LLMs), the branch of generative AI specifically focused on text, underlie their operation. The current work conceptually questions the effects of using AI tools for research and policy purposes, exploring the specific case of the SDGs. For each of the five SDGs analyzed, an open-source LLM with no prior knowledge has been trained in parallel to the diverse SDG classifications assigned by the three bibliometric databases mentioned above.
Our analysis shows that the introduction of a generic AI tool in between the SDG classification and the policymaker systematically overlooks the most disadvantaged categories of individuals, the poorest countries, under-represented topics, and inequality metrics that SDG targets explicitly focus on.
About the speaker
About the speaker
I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) in Berlin, where I have dealt with LLMs in Education and Research Policy. I am a theoretical physicist by training, and I received my PhD in applied mathematics from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa in 2022. I chose to get experienced with the agent-based modelling of societies, economies and financial markets. Moreover, I focused on the decision-making of agents in economic and financial frameworks by means of agent-based modelling. Furthermore, I explored analytically and numerically the learning processes and the expectations of economic agents, questioning the concept of the rational agent thoroughly and implementing bounded rationality alternatives (e.g., ecological rationality). In addition, I explored the click-baiting of news headlines, specifically their most impacting linguistic features, the recommender algorithms allocating them, the A/B testing implemented to maximize clicks, and how all the latter influence/polarize the dynamics of information/attention at the aggregate level, simulating social media platforms.
I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) in Berlin, where I have dealt with LLMs in Education and Research Policy. I am a theoretical physicist by training, and I received my PhD in applied mathematics from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa in 2022. I chose to get experienced with the agent-based modelling of societies, economies and financial markets. Moreover, I focused on the decision-making of agents in economic and financial frameworks by means of agent-based modelling. Furthermore, I explored analytically and numerically the learning processes and the expectations of economic agents, questioning the concept of the rational agent thoroughly and implementing bounded rationality alternatives (e.g., ecological rationality). In addition, I explored the click-baiting of news headlines, specifically their most impacting linguistic features, the recommender algorithms allocating them, the A/B testing implemented to maximize clicks, and how all the latter influence/polarize the dynamics of information/attention at the aggregate level, simulating social media platforms.
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