Thomas Klebel
@tklebel.bsky.social
Senior Scientist @ IDea_Lab / University of Graz. I'm interested in what AI does to science, how we can be more reproducible when conducting studies, and how we can make studies more robust and informative by using causal inference techniques.
I wrote about science funding, science reform, and anti-science agendas. scatter.wordpress.com/2026/07/31/s...
science funding and the cherry picking problem
Science publishing–like all of science–requires money. There’s no getting around it, even with the open science movement. What appears free to many authors and readers still requires money and infr…
scatter.wordpress.com
The University of Graz invites applications for a full professorship in Data Analysis, with a focus on Natural Language Processing! For details, see ▶️ job ad jobs.uni-graz.at/en/jobs/f38f... ▶️ fact sheet cloud.uni-graz.at/s/RA92YSf29z...
Universität Graz
jobs.uni-graz.at
NEW POST: 'Wiley’s Acquisition of Emerald: Some observations from Copim': copim.pub/wileys-acqui... The post explores issues of scale and corporate consolidation in academic publishing raised by the acquisition, heightened by the emphasis on the anticipated role of #AI. #Scale #AcademicPublishing
Wiley’s Acquisition of Emerald: Some observations from Copim - Copim
Copim reflects on Wiley’s acquisition of Emerald and the issues of scale and corporate consolidation in academic publishing.
copim.pub
New tutorial on a core CSS problem: Text classification often treats "is this valid" and "does this model work" as separate questions hurting measurement quality. We propose "computational social mixed methods" to unify annotation, ML & stats into one coherent pipeline: doi.org/10.3758/s134... 🧵
A really interesting piece on reducing AI cheating in the classroom from a Professor of English and former Dean of Humanities at University of Utah. The solutions? Smaller classes, lower teaching loads for faculty, and in-person classes.
How to limit unauthorized AI use in the classroom
A handy rule
hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com
Here's my new blogpost on the dataset I have created alongside @ksolovev.com: we decided to solve the issue of data availability for research on news articles by processing, cleaning, tagging and indexing the whole news subset of the Common Crawl, resulting in cs2.uni-graz.at/blog/infini-...
OpenAlex announces an improvement to their corresponding author assignment. Haven’t checked it out in detail yet, but big if true. This data field is one of the main gaps that cause me pain.
A big improvement to our corresponding-author data - OpenAlex blog
We’ve made a major, systematic improvement to how OpenAlex finds and assigns corresponding authors, and the corresponding institutions tied to them. On a hand-checked gold standard, precision rose fro...
blog.openalex.org
New: Researchers have quantified how easy AI search is to manipulate. Just 13 words buried in a random Reddit comment can poison AI search results. They suggest this is not easy to stop: "The way you can attack these systems is so much dumber than you think it is" www.404media.co/it-is-trivia...
It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests
"We show that a tiny snippet—just 13 words—of retrieved text on a UGC website like Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, or Facebook can change AI agents to output spam / scam content pretty consistently."
404media.co
Join us as a postdoctoral researcher! "Invisible Knowledge Work in Open Science Practices", funded by OSNL #STS #metascience Come help us map and understand the invisible labour that enables, allows, supports and shapes #openscience, and lets it grow. Mostly #qual work, with small #quant pockets.
Postdoctoral Researcher Invisible knowledge work in open science practices
Welcome to Maastricht University! Are you an ambitious post-doctoral researcher with an Open Science mindset who seeks to unravel the threads of visibility and invisibility of staff across research pr...
academictransfer.com
Wonderful news! Journal of Research on Research is launched. "if you are a researcher who researches any aspect of research, then this is the journal and community for you." Worth reading the whole editorial for a transparent and thoughtful account of this amazing community-driven effort.
Research on Research Association@roration.bsky.social · 2mo agoWe're excited to launch J·ROR, the Journal of Research on Research. A new open-access home for research on how research is funded, organised, conducted, communicated, and evaluated. Our first editorial: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... #ResearchOnResearch #MetaScience #OpenScience #STS
"SSRN, a preprint server for social sciences research, had the highest rate of hallucinated citations at nearly 2%, almost five times higher than any other major repository." www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Hallucinated citations highest in social sciences preprints site
More than 140,000 fake citations across four research repositories were identified in papers and preprints published in 2025 alone.
nature.com
“…hallucinated references disproportionately assign credit to already prominent and male scholars, suggesting that LLM-generated errors may reinforce existing inequities in scientific recognition…” 🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2605.07723
LLM hallucinations in the wild: Large-scale evidence from non-existent citations
Large language models (LLMs) are known to generate plausible but false information across a wide range of contexts, yet the real-world magnitude and consequences of this hallucination problem remain p...
arxiv.org
Under the banner "The winding road to better science", we are joining forces with our metaresearch centre and are offering ourselves as hosts for potential MSCA postdoctoral fellows. If you are interested in developing a project on or across the boundaries of #metascience and #STS, reach out! 1/
📣 The difference between replicable and not replicable is not itself scientifically replicable. 📣 New work with Erkan Buzbas, showing that verdicts such as "X% of results replicated" are based on an inferential machinery that doesn't work. arxiv.org/abs/2604.26268
A long read about the state of AI and mathematics. davidbessis.substack.com/p/the-fall-o...
The fall of the theorem economy
How AI could destroy mathematics and barely touch it
davidbessis.substack.com
Good news everyone 🥳 Our (w @vincentab.bsky.social) primer on models as prediction machines (with the marginaleffects package) is finally officially published!> journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Models as Prediction Machines: How to Convert Confusing Coefficients Into Clear Quantities - Julia M. Rohrer, Vincent Arel-Bundock, 2026
Psychological researchers usually make sense of regression models by interpreting coefficient estimates directly. This works well enough for simple linear model...
journals.sagepub.com
We are inviting applications for a two-year postdoctoral position in a collaborative meta-science project on the effectiveness of data and code sharing policies in research-performing organizations. www.tue.nl/en/working-a...
Postdoc In Meta-science
Personal type: Scientific staff
tue.nl
The AI economy looks...really precarious. So @matteowong.bsky.social & I did a bunch of reporting to try to figure out what happens when a potential bubble collides with a war in Iran and a potential resource shortage. The answer is...arguably the most dire stuff i've heard from smart ppl in a while
The AI Boom Wasn’t Built for the Polycrisis
“There are too many ways for it to fail for it not to fail.”
theatlantic.com
Interesting paper. When science is cheap, multiverse analysis becomes the key abstraction for authors & journals to strategize for. These results suggest its the new unit of evidence authoring & review should accommodate. Related to some of my comments here: substack.com/@jessicahull...
Nic Fishman@njw.fish · 5mo agoThere's a growing worry that AI will break empirical social science -- that agents can p-hack until they find something that "works." We think that worry deserves to be taken seriously. Our new paper shows that is true empirically and makes it precise: njw.fish/static/paper...
Today I had the pleasure of starting my new role at the Complex Social & Computational Systems group of @janalasser.eurosky.social at University of Graz as a Senior Scientist, to support the group in research data and software engineering tasks.
🧵on my new paper "Synthetic personas distort the structure of human belief systems" w Roberto Cerina I'm v excited about... 🚨 Do synthetic samples look like human samples? We compare 28 LLMs to the 2024 General Social Survey (GSS) to find out + develop host of diagnostics...
Raises important questions: how will #scholcomm adapt, which norms around publishing will emerge? How will research assessment work in the future? What do we want "research" to look like? Curious to see where @socarxiv.bsky.social will end up with their policy.
Pamela Oliver@pamelaoliver.bsky.social · 5mo agoI'm the moderator who flagged the submission Philip is talking about here. The goal is a conversation about balance of "AI" and human work in papers. I think I may write a post about my own opinions, but we social scientists need to have a broader conversation about this. In particular, 1/2
Gift link (hope it works) for the @ftrain.bsky.social NY Times piece on the impact of post-November-2025 coding agents (like Claude Code) on the cost of developing software - it's very worth a read www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/o...
Opinion | The A.I. Disruption We’ve Been Waiting for Has Arrived
nytimes.com
"The 2026 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) has received more than 24,000 submissions — more than double that of the 2025 meeting." That's just absurd. Maybe there was substantial growth before, but this is clearly unsustainable.
Samuel Moore@samuelmoore.org · 6mo agoAnother story where you realise that absolutely no one has any idea how to deal with all the AI papers being cranked out. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Great thread, with lots of important considerations and implications for the metascience community.
Berna Devezer@devezer.bsky.social · 6mo agoOn the publication bias discourse, I regret that metascience has become a source of decontextualized, low-res, bean-counting-focused `science is in crisis' narratives. It is largely uncurious abt science, desperately lacking in theory & measurement. I'll quote a few takes I liked & add my thoughts🧵
Good to see ubiquitous publication bias documented that well for an entire field. I'd expect the same to be true for sociological research, although methods are probably more diverse there.
Ryan Briggs@ryancbriggs.net · 6mo agoI have a new paper. We look at ~all stats articles in political science post-2010 & show that 94% have abstracts that claim to reject a null. Only 2% present only null results. This is hard to explain unless the research process has a filter that only lets rejections through.
A variation: Scientists who claim they’re “not interested in causality” because they assume the term only applies to deterministic, law-like relationships that are unrealistic in their field. Instead, they’re interested in how “X drives Y”, the effects of X, the “extent to which X matters for Y”>
Julia M. Rohrer@dingdingpeng.the100.ci · 6mo agoSome people confuse correlation and causation, some people confuse causation and “deterministic direct 1:1 causation” 🥲
The stories we tell build our world, so we should be careful about the stories we tell ourselves and we should be wary of the stories that others tell. This goes for politics and for science alike.
@centertrialerror.bsky.social · 6mo agoNew on Cultures of Trial and Error: Open Science isn’t just a set of reforms, but also a story about science in crisis, heroes, urgency, and repair. In this post, Sheena Bartscherer looks at the narrative side of (Open) Science, and why these stories matter blog.trialanderror.org/cultures-of-...
"Honest, dedicated, skilled researchers may investigate a topic and come to opposite conclusions because of variation between how they conduct their analysis" My sense is almost all experienced researchers are intuitively aware of this, but nevertheless we tend to ignore this inconvenient truth!
Tom Stafford@tomstafford.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy · 6mo agoRead my latest post for reflections on reproducibility, research quality and a summary of a great new study which shows how NOT to do it https://open.substack.com/pub/tomstafford/p/gambling-with-research-quality
