Media plays a big role in how citizens evaluate public health emergencies. This project seeks to understand how public health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the opioid crisis are reported. In order to assess the polarization and politicization of U.S. news coverage, we are comparing news by political leaning (left, center, right) as segmented by AllSides media bias ratings. We…
Policy in areas such as conservation, energy, healthcare, and sustainable development is informed by a variety of factors, including the best available science. Determining the best available science requires synthesizing multiple scientific results to gauge both the level of scientific consensus and the reliability of the research. However, on some policy-relevant topics, syntheses continue…
Biased citation benefits authors in the short-term by bolstering grants and papers, making them more easily accepted. However, it can have severe negative consequences for scientific inquiry. The need for a bias detection tool is evident from previous studies on citation bias, but existing work lacks crucial elements needed to scale the underlying approaches. This project will test the…
This project is intended to reduce the real and perceived danger to science and society when retracted research is mistakenly circulated within the digital scholarly record. The goal is to build more confidence in scientific discovery. Retraction alerts readers to unreliable scholarly material and is intended to remove that information from the citable record. Harm can result when faulty…
Scientific and technical information is often translated for the public, by knowledge brokers such as journalists, Wikipedia editors, activists, and public librarians. This project will research how knowledge brokers assess the quality of scientific and technical information and the implications for public access, information literacy, and understanding of science. The project will use case…
Doctoral candidates Yuanxi Fu and Lan Li have received Beta Phi Mu's 2025 Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship awards for their ongoing dissertation research at the iSchool. This prestigious award honors four doctoral students in library and information science, information studies, informatics, or a related field. Fellowship recipients are awarded $3,000.
Members of Associate Professor Jodi Schneider’s group will present their research at the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Workshop on Informetric, Scientometric, and Scientific and Technical Information Research, which will be held virtually on November 6 and 13. The MET-STI 2024 Workshop is collaboratively hosted by the Special Interest Group for Metrics (SIG-MET) and Special Interest Group for Scientific and Technical Information (SIG-STI) of ASIS&T.
iSchool faculty and students will present their research at the 10th International Conference on Computational Models of Argument (COMMA 2024), which will be held from September 18-20 in Hagen, Germany, as well as pre-conference workshops. The conference brings together researchers interested in computational models of argument and the representation of argumentation structures in natural language texts.
Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award to assess how to identify potential sources of bias in research and how confident we can be in the conclusions drawn from a particular body of evidence. This prestigious award is given in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Schneider's project, "Using Network Analysis to Assess Confidence in Research Synthesis," will be supported by a five-year, $599,963 grant from the NSF.
Assistant Professor Jodi Schneider presented her research on argumentation mining at a doctoral workshop at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland on September 2-3. Her lecture and tutorials were featured during the University’s Language and Cognition program’s “Linguistic and Corpus Perspectives on Argumentative Discourse” workshop. Schneider discussed problem definitions, corpora, and argument annotation for mining arguments from text.