James M. Zumel Dumlao
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jamesmzd.bsky.social
James M. Zumel Dumlao
@jamesmzd.bsky.social
730 followers 110 following 35 posts
PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information :: Knowledge/Cultural Production, Science of Science :: he/him/his

https://jamesmzd.github.io/
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jamesmzd.bsky.social
James M. Zumel Dumlao @jamesmzd.bsky.social · Aug 14
Now published at PNAS ‼️ w/ @innovation.bsky.social

How does peer reviewer diversity affect fairness in peer review and the direction of published science? We find a "geographical representation bias" in 60 STEM journals published by @ioppublishing.bsky.social.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Title and author info of PNAS paper linked
Reposted by James M. Zumel Dumlao
jessexjesse.bsky.social
November 9, 2025 at 5:13 AM
Reposted by James M. Zumel Dumlao
jessicacalarco.com
We have progressed from data collection to data analysis.
My 11-year-old sitting with her pile of Halloween candy, sorting it into a bar graph
November 1, 2025 at 12:31 AM
Reposted by James M. Zumel Dumlao
annabower.bsky.social
EXCLUSIVE: One Saturday afternoon in October, my phone lit up with a notification.

I glanced down at the message.

“Anna, Lindsey Halligan here,” it began.

So began my text exchange with the woman who is prosecuting the president's perceived political enemies.

www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna...
"Anna, Lindsey Halligan Here." Anna Bower Monday, October 20, 2025, 5:40 PM Share On: f X inK My Signal exchange with the interim U.S. attorney about the Letitia James grand jury.
October 20, 2025 at 10:09 PM
Reposted by James M. Zumel Dumlao
molly.wiki
slightly ominous mailer from the Red Cross
Mailer that reads: Molly, Seasons may change, but the need for blood is constant.
October 1, 2025 at 7:24 PM
Reposted by James M. Zumel Dumlao
lseblogs.bsky.social
Analysing submissions to 60 Institute of Physics journals, @jamesmzd.bsky.social & Misha Teplitskiy find that #PeerReviewers tend to favour submissions from their own countries, meaning authors from countries with few reviewers face a major structural barrier.

@lseimpactblog.bsky.social
Lack of geographic diversity in peer review skews “publishable” research - Impact of Social Sciences
An analysis of peer review data for 204,718 submissions to 60 Institute of Physics journals finds that reviewers tend to favour submissions from their own countries.
blogs.lse.ac.uk
September 20, 2025 at 9:00 AM
Reposted by James M. Zumel Dumlao
lseimpactblog.bsky.social
🗃️ From the archive: "When implemented without democratic oversight, global performance metrics risk becoming tools of centralisation"

#Bibliometrics #ResearchAssessment
How authoritarian states co-opt academic modernisation and bibliometrics for control - Impact of Social Sciences
Do bibliometric performance metrics, which underpin global higher education policies, also provide a means for authoritarian states to coerce academics?
blogs.lse.ac.uk
September 20, 2025 at 9:39 AM
Reposted by James M. Zumel Dumlao
motorres.bsky.social
Austerity measures all over the place but the university has $50 million for… whatever this is
U-M announces investment in institute for civil discourse | The University Record
record.umich.edu
September 18, 2025 at 11:29 PM
Reposted by James M. Zumel Dumlao
babeheim.bsky.social
How to quantify the impact of AI on long-run cultural evolution? Published today, I give it a go!

400+ years of strategic dynamics in the game of Go (Baduk/Weiqi), from feudalism to AlphaGo!
Miyagawa Shuntei's 1898 painting, "Playing Go (Japanese Chess)"
September 16, 2025 at 2:04 PM
Reposted by James M. Zumel Dumlao
lseimpactblog.bsky.social
💥New: Lack of geographic diversity in peer review skews “publishable” research

✍️ @jamesmzd.bsky.social & Misha Teplitskiy

#PeerReview #PeerReviewWeek #PRW25 #AcademicSky
Lack of geographic diversity in peer review skews “publishable” research - Impact of Social Sciences
An analysis of peer review data for 204,718 submissions to 60 Institute of Physics journals finds that reviewers tend to favour submissions from their own countries.
blogs.lse.ac.uk
September 17, 2025 at 10:21 AM
Reposted by James M. Zumel Dumlao
olivia.science
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
September 6, 2025 at 8:13 AM
Reposted by James M. Zumel Dumlao
elisabethbik.bsky.social
After the lunch break, the next session will be 'Open Science and Data Sharing'
The first of three talks will be by Vincent Yuan, with 'Researcher Adherence to Journal Data Sharing Policies: A Meta-Research Study'
VY: Science runs on trust - but we need evidence.
#PRC10
Speaker and opening slide with red background
September 5, 2025 at 6:32 PM
jamesmzd.bsky.social
Proud of my union coworkers ( @geo3550.bsky.social ) for pushing to bring graduate research back under contractual protections. All grad workers were in unit when we started 50 years ago, it’s time we get back to that. www.michigandaily.com/news/adminis...
Graduate student researchers launch campaign for unionization
Graduate student research assistants at the University of Michigan have relaunched their push for unionization.
www.michigandaily.com
September 5, 2025 at 3:40 PM
jamesmzd.bsky.social
Nothing like good ‘ol Michigan football straight to the face
August 31, 2025 at 12:01 AM
Reposted by James M. Zumel Dumlao
markrubin.bsky.social
Reflexive Reflexivity

“We advocate for *robust reflexivity,* a practice that critically reflects on reflexivity itself.”

‪By @catherinetrundle.bsky.social and colleagues

Open Access: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
Qualitative researchers are increasingly utilising reflexive practices to ensure transparency and assure quality. Current researcher reflexivity, we show, often hinges upon a set of assumptions about reflexivity itself. Through a critical literature review combined with reflexive vignettes, we offer an epistemological critique of reflexivity. We advocate for robust reflexivity, a practice that critically reflects on reflexivity itself. We thus encourage qualitative researchers to critique their reflexive practices in four ways: (1) we challenge the idea that reflexivity leads to revelation, and show the ways this idea reintroduces positivist notions of Truth under a constructionist guise; (2) we challenge simple binaries within many positionality statements, nuancing ideas of insider and outsider status, affinity and difference, and the dynamism of identity over time; (3) we show how reflexivity is a socially and culturally embedded practice, rather than a neutral and universal cognitive practice; and (4) we foreground the power dynamics of reflexivity, cautioning against the co-option of reflexivity in ways that perpetuate social inequities and mask hierarchies within research. To support robust reflexive practices, we offer a toolkit of questions that can act as prompts for critical engagements with reflexivity, and argue for the creation of more robustly reflexive methodological resources.
August 27, 2025 at 8:31 AM
Reposted by James M. Zumel Dumlao
tomstafford.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy
The future of AI superintelligence is already here, it is just not evenly distributed yet

#genai #llms #cogsci #chess

https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/superhuman-intelligence-already-exists
Text: superhuman intelligence already exists, and how it has affected the game of chess tells us something
August 20, 2025 at 10:40 AM
Reposted by James M. Zumel Dumlao
jessexjesse.bsky.social
Congratulations @jamesmzd.bsky.social , USF MS-IDEC class of 2020!! Excellent and timely research on the structural forces working against international researchers with science of science superstar @innovation.bsky.social .
#econsky #polisky #socsky
jamesmzd.bsky.social James M. Zumel Dumlao @jamesmzd.bsky.social · Aug 14
Now published at PNAS ‼️ w/ @innovation.bsky.social

How does peer reviewer diversity affect fairness in peer review and the direction of published science? We find a "geographical representation bias" in 60 STEM journals published by @ioppublishing.bsky.social.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Title and author info of PNAS paper linked
August 16, 2025 at 5:09 PM
jamesmzd.bsky.social
Now published at PNAS ‼️ w/ @innovation.bsky.social

How does peer reviewer diversity affect fairness in peer review and the direction of published science? We find a "geographical representation bias" in 60 STEM journals published by @ioppublishing.bsky.social.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Title and author info of PNAS paper linked
August 14, 2025 at 5:55 PM
Reposted by James M. Zumel Dumlao
ssrn.bsky.social
This paper explores academic peer review as a source of knowledge transfer and learning for the reviewers themselves.
spkl.io/63328A1crC
@innovation.bsky.social @jamesmzd.bsky.social
Stack of papers and books
July 23, 2025 at 3:00 PM
jamesmzd.bsky.social
Had a great time presenting these findings at #metascience2025 and looking forward to getting even more eyes on it at the #NBERSummerInstitute2025 session on Science of Science Funding (July 17-18)!

Catch in online July 17, 3:30pm at www.youtube.com/nbervideos
July 6, 2025 at 4:29 PM
jamesmzd.bsky.social
🏮NEW WORKING PAPER ALERT🏮

Scientists collectively spend tens of millions of hours peer reviewing each year, mostly for no $$. Why??

In new work w/ Charles Ayoubi and @innovation.bsky.social, we observe a private benefit for participating in evaluation: 💡💡Learning💡💡
Title page of "Learning by Evaluating" Probability of citing manuscript within 3 years, by review status. Reviewers are more than twice as likely to cite reviewed paper in future work compared to invited reviewers who declined due to unavailability.
July 6, 2025 at 4:25 PM
Reposted by James M. Zumel Dumlao
carlbergstrom.com
1. Another Friday afternoon massacre of sorts:

NIH just rescinded its Scientific Integrity Policy.

h/t @lizborkowski.bsky.social
NOT-OD-25-080: Rescission of the Final Scientific Integrity Policy of the National Institutes of Health
NIH Funding Opportunities and Notices in the NIH Guide for Grants and Contracts: Rescission of the Final Scientific Integrity Policy of the National Institutes of Health NOT-OD-25-080. OD
grants.nih.gov
March 30, 2025 at 4:03 AM
Reposted by James M. Zumel Dumlao
inthesetimes.com
In a letter dictated over the phone from ICE detention in Louisiana, Mahmoud Khalil said that his arrest "was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine."

"It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom."
My Name is Mahmoud Khalil and I Am A Political Prisoner
A letter dictated by Khalil over the phone from ICE detention in Louisiana.
inthesetimes.com
March 18, 2025 at 9:54 PM
Reposted by James M. Zumel Dumlao
jmendelsohn2.bsky.social
New preprint!
Metaphors shape how people understand politics, but measuring them (& their real-world effects) is hard.

We develop a new method to measure metaphor & use it to study dehumanizing metaphor in 400K immigration tweets Link: bit.ly/4i3PGm3

#NLP #NLProc #polisky #polcom #compsocialsci
🐦🐦
Screenshot of top half of first page of paper. The paper is titled: "When People are Floods: Analyzing Dehumanizing Metaphors in Immigration Discourse with Large Language Models". The authors are Julia Mendelsohn (University of Chicago) and Ceren Budak (University of Michigan). The top right corner contains a visual showing the sentence "They want immigrants to pour into and infest this country". The caption says: Figure 1: Dehumanizing sentence likening immigrants to the source domain concepts of Water and Vermin via the words "pour" and "infest". The abstract text on the left reads: Metaphor, discussing one concept in terms of another, is abundant in politics and can shape how people understand important issues. We develop a computational approach to measure metaphorical language, focusing on immigration discourse on social media. Grounded in qualitative social science research, we identify seven concepts evoked in immigration discourse (e.g. "water" or "vermin"). We propose and evaluate a novel technique that leverages both word-level and document-level signals to measure metaphor with respect to these concepts. We then study the relationship between metaphor, political ideology, and user engagement in 400K US tweets about immigration. While conservatives tend to use dehumanizing metaphors more than liberals, this effect varies widely across concepts. Moreover, creature-related metaphor is associated with more retweets, especially for liberal authors. Our work highlights the potential for computational methods to complement qualitative approaches in understanding subtle and implicit language in political discourse.
February 20, 2025 at 7:59 PM