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Over the past decade, Open Science has transformed the way we create, share, and evaluate research. Among the many domains of Open Science (Bertram et al. 2023), two have received growing attention: open data and open peer review.
Yet these two worlds do not often meet.
We regularly discuss the importance of sharing data to support transparency, reproducibility, and reuse (Wilkinson et al. 2016). We also explore new approaches to peer review that are more open, inclusive, and collaborative (Ross-Hellauer et al. 2023). But we rarely stop to ask what happens when datasets themselves become the subject of review.
Recent initiatives have begun exploring ways to connect open data and open peer review (Modular Peer Review; Sansing and Wilkinson 2025). One notable development came in November 2025, when PREreview introduced support on their platform for reviewing datasets deposited in Dryad, an open-access general-purpose data repository. It is in this context that the FORCE11 PREreview Club was invited to pilot a collaborative and structured dataset review process. Our review of the dataset, \"Leverage metrics to drive data sharing at the Science journals\" by Valda Vinson and Lauren Kmec (2025), is now posted on PREreview and archived on Zenodo (Akuma et al. 2026). It is the first open review of a dataset shared on PREreview.
In this blog post, we reflect on that experience, discuss what we learned, and consider the opportunities of dataset review as an emerging scholarly practice.
The Vinson and Kmec dataset (2025) focuses on data and code-sharing practices in articles published by Science. At first glance, it seemed like an ideal case study: data deposited in an open repository, documentation available for users, and a topic closely connected to Open Science itself.
As our discussion unfolded, however, it became clear that reviewing a dataset involves different questions from those we typically ask when reviewing a preprint or a journal article. Rather than focusing solely on findings or conclusions, we found ourselves examining the processes behind the data. How were key variables constructed? How transparent were the classification methods? What assumptions shaped the dataset? How reproducible was the workflow? And what limitations should future users keep in mind when reusing the data?
Very quickly, the conversation moved into topics such as FAIR and CARE principles, metadata quality, methodological transparency, provenance, responsible reuse, and the implications of using automated systems to measure Open Science practices.
In a sense, the review became a metascientific exercise: a group of researchers evaluating a dataset designed to measure behaviors associated with Open Science itself. What began as a discussion about a dataset soon became a broader conversation about trust, transparency, and how we assess research outputs beyond traditional publications.
One of the most rewarding aspects of the experience was the diversity of perspectives involved in the review. The review brought together researchers based in India, Mexico, T\u00fcrkiye, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with backgrounds spanning scholarly communication, research assessment, bibliometrics, data management, and Open Science.
Although we were all reviewing the same dataset, we examined it through vastly different lenses. Some participants focused on reproducibility and workflow validation. Others paid closer attention to metadata quality, cross-publisher comparisons, methodological transparency, or the broader ethical and geopolitical implications of data reuse.
These different and diverse perspectives enriched the discussion. Together, they helped us develop a more nuanced understanding of the dataset, its strengths, and its limitations than any one of us could likely have achieved alone.
This collaborative process also highlighted one of the strengths of open, collaborative peer review. When reviewers bring different experiences, disciplinary backgrounds, and regional perspectives to the table, evaluation becomes more than quality control\u2014it becomes a form of collegial discourse and collective learning.
Perhaps the most important lesson for us was seeing how open review can help bridge the distance between data producers and data users.
One of the greatest challenges in data reuse is not simply gaining access to data, but understanding the context in which the data were created, the decisions that shaped them, and the limitations that accompany their use. Datasets rarely speak entirely for themselves. Even well-documented data often leave room for questions about methods, assumptions, and interpretation.
Open review creates a space where those questions can be raised collectively, transparently, and constructively. It also provides an opportunity for data producers and data users to engage in dialogue, helping to clarify uncertainties, identify issues that may affect reuse, and strengthen future versions of a dataset.
The experience also reminded us that making data available is not the same as making data understandable, reusable, or trustworthy for every purpose. Openness requires infrastructure, but it also requires documentation, clear licensing, robust metadata, methodological transparency, and ongoing dialogue with the communities that may eventually reuse the data. As datasets evolve through updates, corrections, and new versions, community feedback can play an important role in supporting their long-term reusability.
In other words, depositing a dataset in a repository is not the end of the story. Rather, it marks the beginning of a new phase for data to become part of the broader scientific discourse. Once shared, datasets can be scrutinized, debated, and critiqued, just like preprints and journal articles. Through review and reuse, datasets can contribute to the refinement of existing knowledge, the generation of new insights, and the advancement of future research.
This experience also reminded us that Open Science extends beyond open access to publications. While open access remains one of its most visible achievements, practices such as open data, open peer review, and responsible data reuse are equally important for building a more transparent and collaborative research ecosystem.
Our open dataset review pilot for PREreview does not answer every question about how research data should be evaluated. But it does demonstrate something important: open data and open review are not separate practices.
When combined, they create new opportunities to strengthen transparency, accountability, and reuse across the research ecosystem. Open data makes reuse possible. Open review helps us understand what we are reusing, how it was created, and what limitations we should keep in mind. Together, they move us closer to a vision of Open Science that extends beyond access alone\u2014one that values not only the availability of research outputs, but also the conversations, feedback, and collective stewardship that help make those outputs meaningful and reusable.
Finally, we would like to thank Jennifer M. Miller for her thoughtful coordination of the review and collaborative writing process, as well as Daniela Saderi and the PREreview team for creating and continuously improving spaces where open and community-driven approaches to research assessment can flourish.
Perhaps that is the most valuable lesson from this experience: opening data matters, but opening the conversation around data can be just as transformative.
After I abandoned the no-AI-for-a-month thing, I'm making up for lost time here. Only thing is now that I'm doing some fairly long-horizon multiagent work in Claude Code and Cowork, I'm frequently blowing through my session limit with just one or two prompts. I've written about this session limit anxiety before.
I'm an early morning person. My typical morning will start with a run or ride or sauna at 5am, and some work (personal projects and day-job work) at around ~6-7 before the camp/school shuffle, and the bike into work. If I do some work with Claude at around 7:00am, my five-hour session limit starts and I typically hit my session limit quickly, which locks me into extra usage at API rates until 12:00pm. Assuming I start another session around noon, that'll extend until 5pm, when I'm normally wrapping things up and heading home. I.e., I'll get two five-hour sessions at most over the course of a normal workday.
I'm short-circuiting that with a little hack. I set my Mac to wake up every morning at 3:58am, and at 4:00am it'll run claude -p \"hey\". That -p flag just tells Claude to print the output of running the prompt, which in this case is \"hey\". It barely uses any tokens, with Claude responding with something like \"hey what's up?\".
But the point is, now my session starts at 4am (instead of 7am), and resets at 9am (instead of 12pm), right about the time I'm settling into the office and getting back to work. Assuming I kick off another session-consuming prompt at 9am, that opens the door to a third session that starts at 2pm. The whole point is now I can get three full 5 hour sessions in a single workday instead of two if I kick off a session very early, effectively shortening my first \"session\" to 2 hours instead of 5.1
I haven't used a Windows computer since Windows 98, so if you're not on Mac, ask Claude how to do this on Windows (Linux is easy with cron). On MacOS I'm using a Launch Agent.
First, set your mac to automatically wake up at 3:58am. Or whenever. Move this forward or backward depending on your daily routine. Point is to have this kick off a prompt a few hours before you really get to work.
# Set an automatic wake every day at 3:58am\nsudo pmset repeat wake MTWRFSU 03:58:00\n# Test - make sure it works\npmset -g schedThen add a launch agent (like a cron job).
vim ~Library/LaunchAgents/us.stephenturner.claudeping.plistCopy the text below into this file. Replace /Users/sdt5z/.local/bin/claude on line 11 with whatever is returned when you run which claude. You'll need to use a full path for this to work.
<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC \"-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN\" \"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd\">\n<plist version=\"1.0\">\n<dict>\n <key>Label</key>\n <string>us.stephenturner.claudeping</string>\n <key>ProgramArguments</key>\n <array>\n <string>/bin/bash</string>\n <string>-lc</string>\n <string>/Users/sdt5z/.local/bin/claude -p \"hey\"</string>\n </array>\n <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>\n <dict>\n <key>Hour</key><integer>4</integer>\n <key>Minute</key><integer>0</integer>\n </dict>\n <key>StandardOutPath</key>\n <string>/tmp/claudeping.log</string>\n <key>StandardErrorPath</key>\n <string>/tmp/claudeping.err</string>\n</dict>\n</plist>\nTest, make sure it works (replace paths/filenames with whatever you called them).
# Tear down the service if it already exists\nlaunchctl bootout gui/$(id -u)/us.stephenturner.claudeping 2>/dev/null\n# Build it again\nlaunchctl bootstrap gui/$(id -u) ~/Library/LaunchAgents/us.stephenturner.claudeping.plist\n# Force the service to start\nlaunchctl kickstart -k gui/$(id -u)/us.stephenturner.claudeping\n# You're looking for an exit code 0\nlaunchctl print gui/$(id -u)/us.stephenturner.claudeping | grep -iE 'last exit|runs'\n# See the logs\ncat /tmp/claudeping.log /tmp/claudeping.errThat's it. Enjoy that extra session while subscription-based subsidized usage lasts!
Yes, I fully realize that I sound like a tokenmaxxing workaholic writing it out this way. I'm not using Claude Code 15 hours per day. In reality while using Opus or Fable you're going to hit a session limit on a $20 plan very quickly. This essentially gives me 3 windows to use Claude at subscription rates instead of 2 windows. Soon enough I'm sure everything's going to be metered at API rates, but for now I'm just trying to take advantage of those VC token subsidies while I can.
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Tim Rakow recently published work that \"investigates the claim that psychological scientists have published only a small quantity of replication research (Chambers, 2017; Ioannidis, 2012).\" He found that 19% of the 1,224 psychology articles examined explicitly referred to \"replication\" in their studies, although \"direct replications were less common than conceptual replications and replications with extension.\"
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Rakow's work reminds me of a theoretical paper by Stephan Guttinger (2018) arguing that replications are everywhere. Guttinger identified what he called \"micro-replications\" in which researchers \"reproduce an earlier finding of another group using their own materials and methods.\" Critically, however, authors do not label these micro-replications as \"replications\" in their work. Hence, they do not tend to be picked up in surveys of the prevalence of replications. As Guttinger explained,
the current debate about the reproducibility crisis is completely blind to the additional level of micro-replications, as the analytic framework used only thinks of replications as add-ons and not as part of regular experimentation.
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Guttinger concluded that:
There might be less need to fundamentally revise the experimental sciences than current talk of a 'crisis' often implies. There is good reason to assume that (successful) replications are much more prevalent
Rakow's work adds to Guttinger's by showing that, in addition to unmentioned micro-replications, researchers also often explicitly report what they term \"replications.\" Hence, Rakow concluded that:
Many researchers are not shy about conducting and reporting replication. Plausibly, at least 20% of psychology articles include author-identified replication; and replication could be considered to be a mainstream practice in experimental psychology. Nonetheless, recommendations for improving replication practices remain relevant because psychology might not be leveraging the full range of benefits afforded by different kinds of replication study (H\u00fcffmeier et al., 2016; Schmidt, 2009). Because conceptual replications appear to be far more common than direct replications, the priority likely lies with greater use of direct replications.
Rakow's point about the rarity of direct replications is well taken. Beth Clarke and colleagues (2026) recently analysed 100 top psychology journals and found that \"only 0.2% of articles (169 articles out of 84,834) were direct replication articles.\"
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So, are replications rare? It depends how you define a \"replication\"! If you mean any case in which researchers replicate a phenomenon, potentially using somewhat different methods (i.e., in conceptual replications and extensions), then no, they're not that rare. But if you restrict your definition to cases in which researchers deliberately set out to conduct direct replication attempts using what they presume to be the same methods and to report their results in dedicated direct replication articles, then yes, they're rare, at least in top journals.
Finally, it is interesting to see Clarke et al. step back to considered the more critical question: What direct replication rate do we actually want?
We recommend that each journal consider what replicability rate they are aiming for, advertise this as one of the journal's aims, and invest in or solicit enough replication studies to assess whether they are meeting their goal. For example, is the journal's aim to publish results that are very definitive (low risk of false positives/negatives) or groundbreaking (high risk of false positives/negatives)? As Srivastava (2011) has argued, articles can rarely be both. We believe that most journals have at least an implicit goal for balancing this trade-off. We encourage journals to make this goal explicit and to invest in replication studies to gauge how well they are meeting their goals.
As I've discussed previously, determining desired replication rates is tricky! But it's encouraging to see metascientists starting to grapple with this important issue (for recent work, see Harper & Sch\u00f6nbrodt, 2026).
Clarke, B., Lee, P. Y. (K.), Schiavone, S. R., Rhemtulla, M., & Vazire, S. (2026). The prevalence of direct replication articles in top-ranking psychology journals. American Psychologist, 81(2), 238\u2013253. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001385
Guttinger, S. (2018). Replications everywhere: Why the replication crisis might be less severe than it seems at first. BioEssays, 40, Article 1800055. https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.201800055
Rakow, T. (2026). Estimating the prevalence of replication research Is challenging, not least because even a thorough database search can be shallow. Perspectives on Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916261452961
Aaron Erlich wrote a blog post questioning whether the time it takes to publish Registered Reports is longer than that for standard articles. As he explains:
There is no published study comparing time-to-publication for registered reports against standard articles. The literature has measured the format's quality (reviewers rated registered reports higher on all nineteen criteria tested), its rate of null results (about 44 per cent of registered-report hypotheses supported, against roughly 96 per cent of results in standard psychology articles), its citations, and how many journals offer it. Nobody has measured the clock. The nearest work asks researchers what they think the cost is: Sarafoglou and colleagues surveyed 355 researchers on preregistration and got \"better science but more work\"; Imai and colleagues surveyed 519 experimental economists and found that more than 80 per cent know what a registered report is, most approve of them \u2014 and adoption is near zero. Neither asked anyone for a date.
He concludes, \"if anyone is interested in trying to collect this data more systematically for political science, please let me know.\"
You can contact Aaron at aaron.erlich@mcgill.ca
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Erlich, A. (2026, August 28). Registered reports are available in political science and used almost nowhere. Blog. https://aaronerlich.com/posts/2026-08-registered-reports/?lang=en
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Hilmar Brohmer and colleagues investigated the myside bias, general trust in science, and the communication of open science practices as predictors of public trust in scientific findings that are communicated through popular-scientific media articles. They found that \"general trust in science and myside bias strongly predicted trust in certain popular-scientific summaries, while explicit Open Science cues did not show an effect.\" Perhaps this is because open science \"practices are perceived as the default, [and so] explicitly mentioning them may offer little additional benefit in terms of increasing trust (Anvari & Lakens, 2018)\"?
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As the authors explained:
We found that OS [open science] practices did not affect trust in the scientific findings, neither individually, nor in interaction with other variables, implying no evidence for either tested hypothesis. This calls into question whether it is necessary to comprehensively report in layperson texts whether or not OS was applied.
Brohmer, H., Gehm, F., & von G\u00f6tz, S. (2026). Believing what we want? Myside bias and the role of open science practices in public trust in science. Science Communication. https://doi.org/10.1177/10755470261475540
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Based on Simonsohn (2020), Yong Cai and colleagues distinguish between \"slow\" p-hacking (e.g., selective data transformation and outlier identification in the same data set) and \"fast\" p-hacking (e.g., file-drawering and then using a new data set). They argue that fast p-hacking exacerbates both strong and weak publication bias, and slow p-hacking exacerbates weak publication bias. However, slow p-hacking may also operate as a form of self-correction by mitigating the effects of strong publication bias (see also Friese & Frankenbach, 2020).
![\"Abstract](\"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hI6L!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe94c935a-535a-45b5-b61b-8bc65d1f56c6_810x849.png\" "\\"Abstract")
![\"\"](\"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VBiZ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F63c8260b-fa89-4405-8cfd-f436383aef94_1200x1200.jpeg\")
Cai et al. conclude:
Our results show that it is important to understand p-hacking in the context of the selection environment that produced it. That p-hacking could mitigate the effects of publication bias under extreme selection also hints at a self-correcting tendency in the scientific process.
Cai, Y., Pernoud, A., & Xu, B. (2026). Does p-hacking mitigate or exacerbate the effects of publication bias? ArXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.05372
Unsere monatliche Rubrik zu aktuellen Veranstaltungen rund um Open Research.
\nAnmerkung zu dieser Rubrik: Das Open Research Office Berlin erstellt monatlich eine \u00dcbersicht \u00fcber Termine und Veranstaltungen zu Open Access und Open Research in Berlin bzw. an Berliner Einrichtungen. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf unseren Partnereinrichtungen und auf Veranstaltungen, die sich an die \u00d6ffentlichkeit richten bzw. die offen sind f\u00fcr Angeh\u00f6rige der Wissenschafts- und Kulturerbeeinrichtungen in Berlin. Wir erg\u00e4nzen diese Liste gerne (Info bitte via Mail ans OROB).\n\n
LLMs k\u00f6nnen die Nutzung fortgeschrittener Funktionen und Tools erleichtern oder \u00fcberhaupt erst erm\u00f6glichen. Sie helfen dabei, anspruchsvolle Excel-Funktionen zu schreiben, SQL- und SPARQL-Queries zu formulieren, mit komplexen regul\u00e4ren Ausdr\u00fccken zu arbeiten, Dateien \u00fcber die Kommandozeile zu verwalten oder kleine Code-Schnipsel zu generieren. LLMs k\u00f6nnen z.B. auch in OpenRefine eingebunden werden und bei der Strukturierung von Information helfen. LLMs k\u00f6nnen hier helfen, es bedarf jedoch grundlegender Kenntnisse der zu Gebote stehenden Werkzeuge. Dar\u00fcber soll im Workshop gesprochen werden. Ebenso werden wir uns \u00fcber die Grenzen und Risiken des Einsatzes von LLMs unterhalten.
\nDieser Workshop zielt darauf ab, in die besonderen ethischen, rechtlichen und praktischen Herausforderungen im Management qualitativer Forschungsdaten einzuf\u00fchren \u2013 z. B. in Bezug auf Datenschutz, informierte Einwilligung, Anonymisierung, Dokumentation und Data Sharing \u2013 und zeigt dabei bew\u00e4hrte Praktiken sowie Beispiele f\u00fcr ein erfolgreiches FDM auf. Die Veranstaltung richtet sich insbesondere an Sozialwissenschaftler*innen, die mit qualitativen Methoden und Daten arbeiten.
\nDie Kultur im KI-Zeitalter. Wird der Traum vom niedrigschwelligen digitalen Zugang zu Bibliotheken, Archiven und Museen nun Realit\u00e4t \u2013 oder entstehen neue Abh\u00e4ngigkeiten? Und welche Verantwortung tragen Staat, Kulturinstitutionen und die gro\u00dfen Technologieunternehmen?
\nWie geht es weiter mit den Berliner Hochschulen? Welche wissenschaftspolitischen Schwerpunkte setzen die Parteien nach der Abgeordnetenhauswahl? Und wie wollen sie gute Arbeits- und Studienbedingungen sowie eine zukunftsf\u00e4hige Hochschullandschaft sichern? Vertreter*innen der demokratischen Parteien im Berliner Abgeordnetenhaus diskutieren ihre Konzepte f\u00fcr die n\u00e4chste Legislaturperiode und stellen sich den Fragen aus Wissenschaft und Hochschule.
\nThe webinar brings together three scholars whose work engages critically and theoretically with openness in history, cultural heritage and the humanities, addressing questions of data governance, research reproducibility, open infrastructures, and the epistemological challenges of working with historical and cultural heritage data. While the emphasis is on theoretical and conceptual perspectives, the presentations also draw on examples and case studies from the speakers' own research. We see this webinar as a space to think together about the tensions and opportunities of openness in the humanities: not only what open research standards call for, but what they mean in practice for historical and heritage scholarship, where sources, data and interpretation are entangled in particular ways.
\nVielleicht bist Du bereits auf Mastodon, Pixelfed oder PeerTube unterwegs. Vielleicht entwickelst Du selbst Anwendungen oder besch\u00e4ftigst Dich mit dezentralen sozialen Netzen aus aktivistischen Gr\u00fcnden, in der Forschung oder als Verbreitungsweg f\u00fcr Deine Kunst. Egal, ob Du Poweruser bist oder komplett #neuhier: Das Programm bietet vom Einsteigerworkshop bis zu Panels und Party alles, was zu einer guten Hackerkonferenz dazugeh\u00f6rt.
\nThis 1.5-day workshop explores how digital research, particularly in the context of non-Latin script languages, can move beyond the constraints of traditional scholarly formats. While books and articles remain central to academic knowledge production, many forms of computational research generate data, models, workflows, and analytical results that cannot be adequately represented through static text, images, or tables alone.
\nBibliotheken stehen mitten im Spannungsfeld aus Digitalisierung, KI und gesellschaftlichem Wandel. Doch genauso herausfordernd wie neue Technologien ist der Umgang mit dem eigenen Handeln \u2013 mit Erfolgen, aber vor allem auch mit Fehlentscheidungen. Diese Veranstaltung l\u00e4dt dazu ein, genau dort hinzuschauen: Wie k\u00f6nnen wir aus Erfahrungen \u2013 inklusive Scheitern \u2013 lernen, um aktiv die Zukunft von Bibliotheken zu gestalten?
\nInterested in open source and open science? Looking to improve your open science training curriculum?\u00a0Join us for an in-person workshop to test a new Library Carpentries course on open source hardware in research settings, and give feedback on how to make it more useful for you.
\nDie Open-Access-Tage sind die zentrale j\u00e4hrliche Konferenz zum Thema Open Access im deutschsprachigen Raum. Sie richtet sich an alle, die sich intensiv mit den M\u00f6glichkeiten, Bedingungen und Perspektiven des wissenschaftlichen Publizierens befassen. Dazu geh\u00f6ren Wissenschaftler*innenInnen sowie Mitarbeiter*innenInnen von Bibliotheken und anderen Einrichtungen der Wissenschaftsinfrastruktur ebenso wie Mitglieder der Wissenschaftsadministration und Verlage.
\nweiter zu Oktober 2026
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/7147g-z9s75","guid":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/?p=4271","language":"de","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1786924800,"rid":"tj4rj-qf489","summary":"Unsere monatliche Rubrik zu aktuellen Veranstaltungen rund um Open Research. Anmerkung zu dieser Rubrik: Das Open Research Office Berlin erstellt monatlich eine \u00dcbersicht \u00fcber Termine und Veranstaltungen zu Open Access und Open Research in Berlin bzw. an Berliner Einrichtungen.","tags":["Allgemein","Veranstaltungshinweise"],"title":"Veranstaltungshinweise September 2026","updated_at":1788852607,"url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/2026/08/17/veranstaltungshinweise-september-2026/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Hare","given":"Maddie"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Bibliomagician Staff"}],"community_id":"f5c1522e-c8de-4681-a317-e32ddb61b26a","created":1780876800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Comment & practical guidance from the LIS-Bibliometrics community","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/bibliomagician","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/f5c1522e-c8de-4681-a317-e32ddb61b26a/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/feed/atom","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress.com","home_page_url":"https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"bibliomagician","status":"active","subfield":"3309","title":"The Bibliomagician","updated":1788797687,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"The Bibliomagician","blog_slug":"bibliomagician","content_html":"Nathalie Corn\u00e9e & Kat Hart
\n\n\n\nCitations aren’t the only way research shows up in policy. Sometimes it’s a named researcher, a nod to “the evidence,” or a reference tucked into the text with no formal citation at all. Kat Hart and Nathalie Corn\u00e9e dug into Overton’s data to find out how often that happens, and what it means for how we understand research’s reach into policy.
\n\n\n\nWhen we want to know if research has influenced policy, we usually turn to citations. They’re easy to spot and easy to count, so it makes sense that they’ve become the go-to signal for research influence.
\n\n\n\nBut citations are only part of the story. Policymakers don’t always follow academic conventions. Sometimes they name a researcher directly, reference a report rather than the paper behind it, or they simply gesture at “the evidence” without pointing to anything specific at all.
\n\n\n\nSo, we set out to ask a simple question: if we look past formal citations, what else might be going on? Using Overton’s data, we compared the scale of formal citations against these more informal mentions and tried to get a sense of what the gap between them might look like. This is an exploratory pilot rather than a definitive study, as the sample is far too small to draw firm conclusions. We hope its value lies more in how it reframes the question of what counts as 'research engaging with policy' (and vice versa) in the first place.
\n\n\n\nDefinitions of research impact are shifting. A recent Australian study published on LSE's impact blog made a useful point on this: institutional definitions of impact often don’t match how researchers actually work (O'Connor et al., 2026). Instead of asking “did this have impact?”, the authors suggest asking “what value does this create, and for whom?” It’s a small shift in framing, but it moves the conversation from proving impact to understanding it.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIf citation counts alone don’t capture the full picture, what other signals should we be paying attention to?
\n
We used the Overton Index as our starting point. At the time of the study, Overton indexed over 27 million policy documents from more than 190 countries and 3,100 sources, spanning everything from intergovernmental organisations like the UN and WHO to NGOs, think tanks, national governments, as well as regional and local bodies like Canadian provinces and UK devolved nations.
\n\n\n\nFor the pilot itself, we kept things deliberately focused. We took a random sample of 50 UK government policy documents from 2025 and used Overton’s AI classification to pull out document type, length, and authorship. Then came the manual part: we read and coded every single document by hand.
\n\n\n\nThis was a conscious choice. Automated tools are good at catching formal citations, but they miss the less obvious ways research shows up in policy text. We wanted to capture all of it, so we built a coding framework covering two broad categories:
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/image.png?w=770\")
Figure 1. Workflow for identifying and classifying attention to actors and objects in UK government policy documents.
\n\n\n\nFor each one, we recorded whether it was a citation (a formal, traceable reference) or a mention (an informal acknowledgement with no formal citation attached). Where a document referenced several things together, we logged each one individually rather than lumping them into a single entry. Across just 50 documents, that added up to over 2,200 individual references, which gave us plenty to work with despite the small sample size.
\n\n\n\nAcross our sample, we identified 2,244 objects and actors in total. Policy actors (think tanks, government bodies, IGOs) and policy evidence (past reports, transcripts, consultation outputs) were by far the most common categories in our data, together with in-house research accounting for around 75% of everything referenced.
\n\n\n\nPeer-reviewed publications, by comparison, made up just under 5% of all references. Generic, non-specific nods to “experts” or “previous research” outnumbered them, at around 9%. In other words, plenty of documents acknowledge that evidence exists somewhere, without pointing to anything specific.
\n\n\n\nPeer-reviewed articles were the type of evidence most likely to receive a full, formal citation. Commissioned research told a different story: it often got absorbed into the narrative (“the data suggests”, “interviews found”) with no formal attribution at all. Policy outputs sat somewhere in between, appearing as both citations and mentions in meaningful numbers.
\n\n\n\nAcross the whole sample, mentions were consistently more common than citations.
\n\n\n\nReferencing patterns varied a lot depending on who authored the document. Our five most prolific authors in the sample were the Department for Education, the Law Commission, UK Government more broadly, the Ministry of Justice, and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) together with the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA). Each had a distinct pattern of what they referenced and how often.
\n\n\n\nA working paper from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, written by commissioned academics, leaned heavily on peer-reviewed citations, as you’d expect. A similar paper from Technopolis, a consultancy commissioned by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), leaned instead on funder acknowledgements and commissioned research. Same document type, same broad government context, very different citation behaviour.
\n\n\n\nWe also tested the intuitive assumption that longer documents would contain more citations. They don’t, at least not cleanly. Some of the highest citation counts did appear in longer documents, but plenty of short documents cited heavily too, and plenty of long ones cited very little. There’s no straightforward relationship between page count and citation volume in this sample.
\n\n\n\nMost documents in our sample didn’t have a formal bibliography at all, relying on footnotes instead. And even where a reference qualified as a formal citation, it only had roughly a 50/50 chance of actually appearing in a bibliography rather than just the body text. Citation habits clearly vary a lot from one policymaker to another.
\n\n\n\nThe research being cited mostly comes from a small number of places
\n\n\n\nOf the peer-reviewed research we identified, half came from UK universities alone, 43% came from international institutions, and the rest reflected UK and international collaborations.
\n\n\n\nA few things stood out consistently across the sample:
\n\n\n\nTaken together, these early findings suggest that citation counts alone may only capture a part of how research reaches policy.
\n\n\n\nWhere we think this work is genuinely useful is in how it reframes the question. Right now, most tools only ask whether a policy document cited a piece of research or not. Splitting that into citations and mentions lets us ask a more useful question: how is research actually showing up, even when there’s no formal reference at all? That feels like a real gap worth exploring.
\n\n\n\nThe coding framework itself, sorting references into different types of evidence and different types of actors, and tagging each one as a citation or a mention, is a first step towards making that visible. It gives us a way to describe the kinds of engagement that citation counts alone may miss, so it’s a starting point for more work.
\n\n\n\nThis also fits with a broader pattern often noted in research impact literature: that scholarly expertise tends to reach policy indirectly, through reviews, consultations, and expert commentary, rather than through direct citation. That raises a genuinely open question: how much of what we’re seeing is a passing reference, and how much reflects real engagement with the research itself?
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBeing able to tell the difference matters if we want to understand not just whether research is being used, but how and why.
\n
This was a small, exploratory pilot, and we’re upfront about its limits. Fifty documents from one country over one year is a start, not a conclusion.
\n\n\n\nNext, we’d like to scale up the sample across a wider, more representative set of countries using an LLM to help with the coding. We’d also like to track whether the balance between citations and mentions is shifting over time and compare document types more systematically to understand whether citation behaviour is driven more by document function or by the authoring body. Beyond that, we want to develop ways to assess the depth of engagement behind a reference, not just whether it exists, and look at whether these patterns differ across policy domains, comparing something like health policy against education policy.
\n\n\n\nIf you have thoughts on this work, or you’re doing something similar, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch at nathalie@overton.io or kat@overton.io.
\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/nathalie.png?w=704\")
Nathalie Corn\u00e9e helps the research and policy community around the world get the most out of Overton. She joined in 2023, bringing more than 20 years of experience across the pharma, research, and academic library sectors, always focused on highlighting the significance of research and supporting the researchers behind it, including through bibliometric analysis. She takes a practical, hands-on approach to helping users find the data they need and make sense of research impact.
\n![\"\"](\"https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/kat.png?w=200\")
Kat Hart is a Senior Analyst at Overton, where she curates policy data and uses bibliometrics to explore evidence-use patterns worldwide. Alongside this, she’s a PhD researcher at the University of Nottingham, studying UK water governance. She previously worked as a knowledge broker in UK higher education, focused on ‘what works’ in connecting academic research with public policy.
\n![\"\"](\"https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/c-cby-1.png\")
Unless it states otherwise, the content of the Bibliomagician is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/74r3r-67451
\n\n\n\n","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/a3dpx-knp02","guid":"https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/?p=5646","image":"https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/image.png?w=770","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1788739200,"reference":[{"id":"https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2026/03/23/we-should-focus-less-on-research-impact-and-more-on-research-value/","unstructured":"O'Connor, R., Malde, S., Russell, W., & Haviland, M. (2026, March 23). We should focus less on research impact and more on research value. LSE Impact Blog."}],"rid":"xx8x7-m3t11","summary":"Nathalie Corn\u00e9e & Kat Hart Citations aren't the only way research shows up in policy. Sometimes it's a named researcher, a nod to \"the evidence,\" or a reference tucked into the text with no formal citation at all.","tags":["Altmetrics","Policy"],"title":"Cited or mentioned? What we learned about how research actually shows up in policy","updated_at":1788852606,"url":"https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/2026/09/07/cited-or-mentioned-what-we-learned-about-how-research-actually-shows-up-in-policy/","version":"v1"}},{"document":{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Jehn","given":"Florian Ulrich","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7296-8008"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"86cf2e28-4644-41b0-9d6d-66444a612b18","created":1751500800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Thoughts about existential risk, history, climate, food security and societal collapse.","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/existentialcrunch","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/86cf2e28-4644-41b0-9d6d-66444a612b18/logo","feed_format":"application/rss+xml","feed_url":"https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/feed","filter":null,"generator":"Substack","home_page_url":"https://existentialcrunch.substack.com","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"existentialcrunch","status":"active","subfield":"2306","title":"Existential Crunch","updated":1788851190,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Existential Crunch","blog_slug":"existentialcrunch","content_html":"![\"\"](\"https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!N-_c!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd2c2347c-adc2-4961-b88e-98e1804912ec_1065x790.png\")
This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here.
After reading dozens and dozens of scientific papers about societal collapse, I wanted a new perspective on the topic. So, I read a lot of novels about societal collapse, as stories shape how we see the world and thus the action we take (1) (2). To my surprise, it turned out to be pretty hard to find books that actually take collapse seriously instead of just using it as a backdrop.
Collapse is a topic people like to tell stories about, as it grasps the imagination with what might be and how everything we have now might be gone in the future. I found the books by searching the internet and asking friends and colleagues for recommendations. This means there is no coherent set of criteria that makes a book collapse relevant, more a vibes based approach on what I and other people felt could be a collapse relevant book. Obviously, this is also not a complete list, so I'd be happy to hear further suggestions in the comments.
This post gives an overview of the books I have read, makes some recommendations on which ones are worth reading and describes what I have learned from reading them.
First, I will give a short overview of the books and what I thought about them. The list is roughly ordered by how much I would recommend reading them, starting with the ones I liked least and ending with my favorites.
The book starts with a great premise: How would the world have developed if the Black Death would have killed 99 % of the European population? And the first few chapters really hammer that home, as they tell the story of a lone warrior trying to survive, only ever finding ruins and death wherever he goes. But after that the book mostly forgets about what got it started, never really mentions that super plague again and instead tells an alternate history story of a monumental battle of cultures between China and an Islamized rest of the world in a connected set of short stories. Don't get me wrong, the book is not bad, but it was quite disappointing to me, as it does not really say anything about collapse, even though the premise would have been great for that. The alternate history of it is interesting, although it sometimes felt like he took the actual history and just replaced all entries of Europe with China. Some of the short stories were quite good and if you like alternate history, this one is still worth checking out.
This story follows the life of a young girl that grows up in a world that is in a slow collapse, likely induced by escalating climate change. Social order is breaking down and people revert more and more to barbarism. The main character is trying to create a new ideology of positive change to counteract this and over the length of the book gathers a ragtag group of other survivors. The world it describes is interesting, but remains quite vague, as the book really wants to focus on the thoughts and feelings of the main character. This makes the collapse element seem more like the backdrop in what is actually a coming of age story. So, it was an okay read for me, but ultimately not that interesting.
The world of this novel is one ravaged by climate change and rampant resource overuse. This has destabilized the world, which humanity tried to counteract by going all in on manipulating biology. Creating pigs to harvest human organs or brainless flesh tubes to produce meat, quickly and cheaply. The story is told from the perspective of Snowman, on of the few survivors of an engineered pandemic. Over the length of the book, it is slowly revealed that Snowman's childhood friend Crake is responsible for this. According to the Wikipedia entry Crake did this to save Earth from humanity, but while reading the book this did not become super clear to me and the whole release of the engineered pandemic felt somewhat random and unearned given the setup. The book is nicely written and good to read, but I did not find the characters super interesting and the societal collapse itself is only described very vaguely.
Here the attempt is to tell the story of humanity from the 1930s until the extinction of the last descendant of humankind. This happens via the last men contacting the author of the book from the future to write down the whole history. It is a very weird book. It reads less like fiction and more like a historical treatise from the future. And the author imagines a very wide variety of future humans ranging from flying humans, to ape humans and also humans that are only giant brains in a vat. You also really notice that this book was written by someone from the 1930s, because oh boy does Olaf Stapledon love eugenics. So many pages in this book are spent on describing how better versions of humanity are bred purposefully. Still, it is quite interesting as an historical document, as it shows how people in the 1930s envisioned the future. Also, it is interesting in how he describes how all the different past civilizations perished, some from resource overuse, some from moral failures or others by just being unlucky. Overall, a fascinating book, but not really that great to actually read.
Not really a book, but a longer short story. The idea is that Earth is suddenly hit by a super deadly pandemic, likely introduced by bioterrorism. Most people die within days, but large groups of sysadmins survive in their data centers, as a large cyber attack just before the pandemic hit all made them gather in their fortress-like data centers, where they are safe for a while due to filtered air and backup power. From those data centers they try to coordinate a response, but have a hard time going anywhere due to never ending discussions. The story itself is just fine, but I liked the focus on infrastructure and its importance. Also, it is always nice if people like sysadmins, who work on maintaining our current world, without ever being seen, get some recognition.
This book wants to tell a story about how human morality is only something rich countries can have, because we live in abundance. This abundance is disrupted by a new kind of virus that kills all grass species in the world. As this includes most of the major food crops, the result is global famine. The book follows a pretty normal English family and how they try to navigate a world that quickly goes from abundance to scarcity. I think the premise of the book is good, as I also think that without food humans might quickly get more aggressive and violent. However, the book does not really tell this change in a convincing manner. The main protagonist of the book just takes a few days to go from polite, boring dad to being completely fine with robbing and killing innocent people to advance his position. Also, it is super misogynistic for no reason. Still, I really liked the idea of what this book could have been, if it would have been better.
A post contraction world. Fossil fuel capitalism has run its course and left the Earth broken. There are only scarce reserves of oil and gas left and so society has reverted again to more mechanical labor. However, this is enhanced by massive bioengineering and there are many new species to take on some of the burden. However, this massive focus on bioengineering also has released many new diseases into the world and food crops have to be continuously adapted to stay valid. Due to this power is concentrated in a few bioengineering corporations that control most of the world. One of the remaining independent countries is Thailand. The book focuses on a set of characters that try to steer their life in better directions, while around them the country slowly degrades into civil war.
I think this book did a pretty good job in describing a plausible future. Everything seems alien, but you can see how today's society could end up in such a scenario. It also goes into a good amount of detail how such a society would work and how it would set different priorities that we do today. What stops this book from being more of a favorite is that the actual story it tells is somewhat meandering, forgets its own strands and then results in a very mid ending. Still, worth checking out just for world building.
This one was recommended to me by several people and I get why. I would not have expected this from a book about a global war against zombies, but this book is pretty good at thinking through how such a collapse would look like and what the consequences might be. It is told through interviews with survivors of the zombie war and describes what happened throughout the war in chronological order.
I am not sure how much I can actually learn from this about \"normal\" collapse, but it certainly was quite interesting to see how the author manages to describe how politics, military tactics or economics change if suddenly the biggest threat to humanity are millions upon millions of zombies.
The reason why this did not make it further in the ranking is that the writing seemed pretty repetitive to me. While the book claims to interview a large group of different people from very different backgrounds, they all sound and feel very similarly, which gets a bit exhausting over the length of the book.
This is essentially Silent Spring, the novel. It is set in a near-future USA where environmental pollution has reached unprecedented heights. In most places you cannot go outside without a filter mask, children are born deformed because of the toxins they are exposed to before birth, and social discontent is brewing because people are no longer willing to tolerate this. The story follows a wide cast of characters: people who just want to make a living and ignore how dysfunctional society is getting around them, regenerative farmers who want to build their own isolated commune, and a reporter trying to push for better governance with the help of an activist leader. Around them society crumbles as people's health declines and the social fabric frays, because nobody believes in a better world anymore.
The book feels a bit like an artifact from another timeline. I can clearly see how somebody writing this in 1972 would see this kind of environmental degradation as the logical end point of the trajectory the USA was on. But it turned out differently, and while the USA is still pretty good at polluting the environment, laws and regulations hemmed it in and made the future in the book much less likely. So in a way it is a positive experience to read this, as it describes a bad future we managed to avoid. The way the book describes society slowly falling apart also felt like a good description to me, as it does not rush the way Death of Grass does. The writing, though, feels a bit janky and took me time to get used to. After the first few chapters I almost decided to skip the book, but now I am happy that I finished it.
Climate change, its consequences and possible solutions are the theme here. In the near future the ministry for the future is founded, which has the task of representing future generations and pushing for projects that allow those future generations a better life. The book mostly follows the head of the ministry and her struggles to actually get things done while facing massive resistance and a former aid worker who gets traumatized by having to live through a deadly heat wave and tries to understand his fate.
This seems to be the most well known collapse relevant novel. If you haven't read it, it is very worth picking up. If you have little time, just read the first chapters about the Indian heat wave. This is the best part of the book and also the most haunting one. The book is very detailed and drills down into the details of what proposals could actually stop climate change and the consequences of us failing to do so in time.
This book is part of a longer series about species uplifting, but it can be read on its own. The plot revolves around a new colony on an exoplanet that is quite hostile to life. It follows the colonizers in their struggle to wrestle a life from the hostile environment. The book is really good in highlighting how hard agriculture is and how much can go wrong, especially in an environment that is not well suited to it. As the situation of the colony gets more and more dire the book shows how the settlers get less and less trusting and putting ever more force into law and order.
I feel like this book does well what Death of Grass tried and failed. Showing that food is the foundation of society and how humans that start trusting and cooperative quickly cease to do so when food gets really scarce. The book also has quite some interesting turns and twists, but I don't want to spoil too much.
Really loved this book. It is the story of two societies and how they organize their political and economic life, told through the eyes of a scientist who visits both of them, but is originally from the anarchist society. The first society is organized as an aristocratic, capitalist society, seeming like a mixture of the UK during the industrial revolution and Cold War USA. The rich suppress the poor, the latter ultimately stage an anarchist revolution and to find peace, they are allowed to resettle to a nearby moon, which is barely habitable. On this moon they start a new society focussed on sharing, consent and ending suppression. Just as the colony in Children of Memory they struggle with the environment and face hunger, but ultimately make it through by the strength of their shared solidarity. Still, this society is not safe from problems either, as even if there is no formal governance, humans easily fall back into power hierarchies and work against the shared solidarity.
The book is really good in contrasting the anarchist society with the capitalist one. Both work as the mirror for the other, showing their shortcomings and where they fail their own values. Ultimately, the anarchist one seems like the much more liveable place, but it is constantly in danger of failing, as it is a constant negotiation between everyone involved. But at least discussion is possible, while in the hierarchy all dissent is violently suppressed.
While none of the societies involved collapses, I think this book is still relevant, as it is so good in contrasting different forms of governance, where they fail and where they succeed, plus the bonus of again highlighting the importance of food. Only in this book the societal bonds are only strained and not broken.
If society collapsed and we found the remains of our modern world decades later, would we be able to decipher what those remains even meant? What would we do with them? Could we still use it to rebuild? These are the questions this book tries to answer. It follows a group of monks over thousands of years as society tries to rebuild after a nuclear war. The monks have made it their task to preserve artifacts and books from the past, even though they do not know how to understand them. They merely keep on copying them, because they think they might prove valuable again in the future.
I enjoyed this book because I feel like it gives a realistic vision of how the world might look after a nuclear war. Humanity would be shattered, but probably not broken. Given enough time, it might restart, especially if some of the previous knowledge is conserved. However, the book also asks the question if humanity would learn from something like that, or if we would simply start to prepare for the next annihilation by our own hands.
The Road does not even mention which catastrophe befell humanity, though it very much seems like nuclear winter. The only thing we know is that things are really, really bad. The book follows a father and a son on their trek through a totally devastated America. They are aiming to find a place where life is better, all while trying to not sacrifice their own morals for their survival.
This book is bleak. Likely the bleakest book I have ever read. But it is so extremely well written that I could not put it down. While it does not teach you anything about how a society might collapse, it teaches you a lot about how horrible it would be if it happened, which is also an important lesson. And still, through all this darkness, it manages to always keep a sliver of hope going, that a better life might still be possible, even in the worst of times.
Wow, what a book. The Deluge explores the next few decades of how climate change might shape our world. It tells a story of activists, corporate advertisers, scientists, government officials and many more, and how all of them try to make sense of an ever more chaotic world and push their agendas forward in it. Everybody has their own ideas of what should be done to steer the USA through the turbulent times of more storms, more heat, more violence, more war, more misinformation. These range from eco-socialism and green growth capitalism to a fascist theocracy.
I was really impressed by how this book handled so many parallel storylines at once and how it braided them together into a very scary, yet always plausible narrative of how the coming decades will play out. I also really liked how it dug deep into how this all shifts and disrupts society and its narratives. It does this deep dive while also managing to be a very good read throughout, with many relatable and three dimensional characters. I think this is my favorite so far, because it explores changes on a societal level, while at the same time being simply a very good and engaging book that tells a cautionary tale of what might await us all quite soon.
While I enjoyed reading all these books about collapse and catastrophe, I am a bit unsure how much I have actually learned while doing so. I started a project to have a new angle on the topics I usually cover. But I had to start wondering if many of these authors take collapse as a topic seriously. For me this would mean that the book really tackles the problems that collapse causes. How do people adapt? How do institutions shift? How are morals under pressure?
For many of the books, you have this one big, defining catastrophe that ends the world or at least completely whacks it out of balance. The book focuses on the catastrophe in some detail in the first few chapters, but then many kind of forget the catastrophe they started the book with? Take Years of Rice and Salt; it starts with the premise of a super deadly pandemic that wipes out all of Europe and the descriptions in some of the earlier chapters are haunting and interesting, but for the following ~700 pages it just is not really a topic anymore.
It seems to me that many of the books here just use the catastrophe as a kind of motivator for the plot. The books are not really about collapse, instead they want to tell a specific story and they want to place it in a collapse scenario, as this gives their protagonists a reason to do stuff. Most often they seem to want to tell a kind of cautionary tale, along the lines of: \"Do humans really have morality or is this just something we can have now, because we are not on the verge of dying?\". And this is not an uninteresting question and some books, especially The Road, really try to answer this on a deep level, but then we have a story about human nature and not a story about how a society might cope with catastrophic conditions.
Maybe I just approached this the wrong way, because I wanted to learn something about collapse using fiction? I do not think so, as there are some books that at least gave a glimpse of what I was looking for. I think the book that did this best was The Deluge.The detailed story over decades in a world reeling under climate really felt like I was learning how we might cope or fail to do so. A Canticle for Leibowitz was also great. It really tries to think through how a society after a nuclear war could cope and how over time even the simplest artifacts from the past could seem like magic, as the reset society does not have the same understanding of the world anymore. Also pretty good in this regard were World War Z and The Sheep Look Up, as they cleanly describes what happens in reaction to this big catastrophe on many levels of society. Though, both are a bit lacking in how they tell their stories.
Looking at which books worked for me and which did not, the best predictor seems to be how much a book focuses on individual actors versus institutions and movements. A narrative usually wants to focus on one or few main protagonists, but collapse happens at the scale of systems. The books that gave me the most insight are exactly the ones that found ways around this. A Canticle for Leibowitz follows an institution over centuries instead of a person, The Deluge tells a decades long story about many characters, each embedded in different institutions and circumstances World War Z replaces protagonists with dozens of interview voices, The Sheep Look Up also has a large cast of characters and The Dispossessed is built around comparing two whole societies. At first The Road looks like it breaks this pattern, as it only ever focuses on two people and still felt quite valuable to me. But I think it provides a different kind of insight. It does not teach you anything about how collapse works, it teaches you why it matters and how horrible it would be. So maybe there are two things fiction can offer here: insight into the dynamics of collapse and insight into its stakes. The systems focused books provide the former, The Road the latter.
The timeline of a book also plays a role. Collapse of a society and the subsequent adaptation necessarily takes longer than a week and if this is the amount of time a book covers, well the collapse insights can only ever be surface level. So, this likely has to be months or rather years or decades. Though, you can also lose the plot in the other direction, as Last and First Men shows. If you are looking at billions of years, everything can only be a fantasy.
Still, I think this project was worth it and I will keep on reading these kinds of fiction books. They might not have been what I was originally looking for, but it certainly was interesting reading them (or at least most of them). And maybe there are more of the kinds of books I am looking for out there? If you know any, please let me know in the comments, I would love to put them on my reading list. Especially books that cover topics besides climate change, pandemics and nuclear war.
Thanks for reading! If you want to talk about this post or societal collapse in general, I'd be happy to have a chat. Just send me a mail to existential_crunch at posteo.de and we can schedule something.
(1) See this post for a detailed argument on why visions of the future are so important for the present.
(2) If you want yet another perspective on the topics, I can also recommend checking out this excellent reading of Lord Byron's Darkness.
Jehn, F. U. (2026, September 8). Learning about collapse from novels. Existential Crunch. https://doi.org/10.59350/ekqqw-80e32
Atwood, M. (2009). Oryx And Crake. Virago.
Bacigalupi, P. (2009). The Windup Girl. Orbit.
Brooks, M. (2006). World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. Del Rey.
Brunner, J. (1972). The Sheep Look Up. Harper & Row.
Butler, O. E. (1993). Parable of the sower.
Christopher, J. (1956). The Death of Grass.
Doctorow, C. (2007). When the Sysadmins ruled the Earth.
Markley, S. (2023). The Deluge. Simon & Schuster.
Le Guin, U. K. (1974). The dispossessed.
McCarthy, C. (2006). The Road.
Miller, W. (1959). A Canticle for Leibowitz.
Robinson, K. S. (2002). The Years of Rice and Salt. Del Rey.
Robinson, K. S. (2020). The ministry for the future. Orbit.
Stapledon, O. (1930). Last and first men.
Tchaikovsky, A. (2023). Children of memory. Orbit.
Spatial machine learning has become a standard tool for producing environmental and geographic prediction maps. It is now relatively (technically) easy to combine field observations with remote sensing, climate, terrain, or other predictor layers and fit a strong machine learning model. The harder question is whether the resulting map is reliable, transferable, and reproducible.
\nIn our paper, Navigating challenges in spatial machine learning: validation, uncertainty, algorithms, and reproducibility, we discuss this question from several connected angles. The paper was written by Jakub Nowosad, Carmelo Bonannella, Darius G\u00f6rgen, Marta Jemeljanova, Teja Kattenborn, Jan Linnenbrink, Hanna Meyer, Madlene Nussbaum, Luca Patelli, Rolf Simoes, and Evelyn Uuemaa1, and published in Erdkunde.
\nThe main argument is that spatial machine learning cannot simply reuse standard machine learning habits without modification. Spatial dependence, clustered and biased sampling, heterogeneous landscapes, and domain transfer all affect how models should be evaluated and interpreted. A model can appear accurate under a standard validation approach and still be unreliable where predictions are needed.
\nWe structure the paper around six themes:
\n![](\"https://jakubnowosad.com/posts/2026-09-08-erdkunde/fig1.png\"/)
Several practical messages follow from this. Validation should match the intended prediction scenario, and prediction-domain adaptive evaluation approaches can help when sticking just to simple random or spatial cross-validation is not appropriate. When training data do not represent the prediction domain, areas outside the model's area of applicability should be identified, masked, or at least communicated clearly. Performance should not be reduced to a single global number: residual maps, spatial patterns of error, uncertainty, and thinking of the goal of the analysis are all important.
\nThe paper also highlights that algorithmic progress alone is not enough. We need benchmark datasets with different spatial properties, clearer comparisons against baseline methods, better uncertainty frameworks, and software that makes robust spatial workflows easier to apply. R currently has several dedicated tools for spatial machine learning workflows, while Python has a strong general-purpose machine learning ecosystem but fewer mature implementations of spatial-specific methods. In both languages, reproducibility still depends heavily on careful reporting of data preparation, resampling, prediction, software versions, and computational choices.
\nThe final part of the paper argues for standardized reporting protocols for spatial machine learning. Such protocols could help researchers document modeling aims, spatial characteristics of the data, validation design, uncertainty treatment, computational requirements, and reproducibility materials. This is also connected to ongoing work on the Spatio-Temporal Modelling Protocol (STeMP).
\n\n\nThe short version is this: spatial machine learning needs to move beyond performance-driven mapping toward workflows that are spatially explicit, uncertainty-aware, and reproducible. Better models are useful, but better evaluation, clearer uncertainty communication, stronger software, and transparent reporting are equally important.
\n
And builds partly on discussions from the Advances in Spatial Machine Learning 2025 workshop. Many thanks to the workshop participants for their feedback and ideas!\u21a9\ufe0e
@online{nowosad2026,\n author = {Nowosad, Jakub},\n title = {Navigating {Challenges} in {Spatial} {Machine} {Learning}},\n date = {2026-09-08},\n url = {https://jakubnowosad.com/posts/2026-09-08-erdkunde/},\n langid = {en}\n}\nThe Rogue Scholar science blog archive has now archived all its currently 55,730 blog posts as PDF files. These PDF files use the archival PDF/A-3A format and include the full-text HTML blog post with metadata embedded as Schema.org attachment, and their PDF URLs are included in the Crossref metadata.
Blog posts are published as web pages in HTML format and often authored in Markdown format. So why PDF? I have been struggling with PDF for a long time, as it is a horrible authoring format, made famous by Peter Murray-Rust:
PDF is a hamburger, and we're trying to turn it back into a cow.
At the same time PDF is an excellent archiving format. The reference manager Papers pioneered the idea of managing reference metadata together with PDF attachments, and other reference managers did something similar. This reference manager \u2013 PDF integration was further enhanced when more scholarly content became available as Open Access and reference manager Zotero added a Find Available PDF integration.
At the same time PDF/A became an official ISO standard for long-term preservation of PDF documents, making it an archiving option for digital repositories such as Rogue Scholar and complementing web-archiving standards such as WARC developed by the Internet Archive, which Rogue Scholar uses since October 2023.
PDF/A comes in several flavors and Rogue Scholar uses PDF/A-3A that allows attachments of files in any format, in this case the full-text HTML with embedded schema.org metadata. These metadata are embedded similar how this is done on web pages crawled by Google and others, but is added from the blog post metadata on PDF generation. This makes extraction of metadata and full-text HTML from PDF files much easier and faster and doesn't require machine learning tools such as GROBID. The latest versions of the commonmeta-py library can open these PDF files and extract the full-text and metadata, and for example convert to other formats.
The link to the PDF file is included in the metadata of every Rogue Scholar DOI, enabling downstream workflows to automatically fetch the PDF (all blog posts in Rogue Scholar are open access with a CC-BY license). One of the important use cases is of course reference managers, and the Zotero browser integration will now automatically not only fetch metadata from Rogue Scholar, but also the full-text PDF:
![\"\"](\"https://storage.ghost.io/c/c5/33/c533c955-b5f3-4ff1-ae2d-6b52a212e602/content/images/2026/09/Bildschirmfoto-2026-09-07-um-15.23.22.png\")
Another interesting use case of these archival PDF files is blog platform migration, e.g. from WordPress to Eleventy, or from Blogger to Quarto. While import scripts from other popular platforms exist, this generic archiving format should make it easier to migrate to any blogging platform. More work is of course needed to write import filters for specific platforms, but this is a big step forward.
Finally, the archival PDFs should make it easier to upload full-text content and metadata to other repository platforms, and the obvious starting point is other repositories also using the InvenioRDM platform.
Please reach out via Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments
Il y a deux ans environ, le projet Zotero a obtenu une bourse pour
Nous relayons ici
Nous vous l'annoncions il y a quelques mois: le nouveau bouton de\ncapture, qui venait d'\u00eatre\nmis en place sur Firefox, allait \u00eatre mis en place pour d'autres\nnavigateurs. C'est d\u00e9sormais chose faite pour Google Chrome\u00a0! (Les\nutilisateurs de Safari doivent encore patienter un peu.)
\n\u00c0 noter: Ce billet est une adaptation de l'
Petit rappel : jusque-l\u00e0, si l'extension Zotero pour Chrome d\u00e9tectait\nune r\u00e9f\u00e9rence sur une page web, il affichait une ic\u00f4ne dans la barre\nd'adresse. Pour les pages sur lesquelles l'extension ne pouvait pas\ntrouver de r\u00e9f\u00e9rences, on pouvait faire un clic droit sur la page et\nchoisir \u00abSave Page to Zotero\u00bb, pour ajouter un document Page\nWeb et une capture dans sa biblioth\u00e8que.
\nDepuis la derni\u00e8re version de l'extension Chrome, il est possible\nd'utiliser le m\u00eame bouton, qui figure en permanence dans la\nbarre d'outils, pour enregistrer un document depuis n'importe quelle\npage :
\nSi l'extension d\u00e9tecte une r\u00e9f\u00e9rence, le bouton affiche la m\u00eame ic\u00f4ne\nque par le pass\u00e9: un livre, un journal, un article de revue, un dossier,\netc. Sur toute autre page, vous verrez une ic\u00f4ne grise qui permettra\nl'enregistrement d'un document Page Web, avec une capture et les\ninformations les plus basiques la concernant (titre, URL, date de\nconsultation).
\nCe bouton unique et simplifi\u00e9 constitue l'avantage principal apport\u00e9\npar cette mise \u00e0 jour. Deux autres nouveaut\u00e9s font leur apparition.
\nD'une part, un menu d\u00e9roulant permet de choisir d'autres\nmani\u00e8res d'importer les r\u00e9f\u00e9rences. En g\u00e9n\u00e9ral, le clic sur le\nbouton reste la meilleure solution. Dans certains cas, le menu d\u00e9roulant\napporte quelques avantages, que vous pouvez d\u00e9couvrir dans le billet que\nnous avions consacr\u00e9 \u00e0 la version Firefox:
D'autre part, il est d\u00e9sormais possible d'enregistrer un PDF\ndans Zotero par un seul clic.
\nJusque-l\u00e0, l'enregistrement d'un PDF n\u00e9cessitait de le faire glisser\ndepuis la barre d'adresse pour le d\u00e9poser dans Zotero ou de\nl'enregistrer en local, puis de l'ajouter manuellement dans Zotero.\nD\u00e9sormais, lorsque vous affichez un fichier PDF dans Chrome, il vous\nsuffit de cliquer sur le nouveau bouton de capture dans la barre\nd'outils pour enregistrer le PDF dans Zotero.1\nIl est cependant import\u00e9 comme simple fichier PDF, sans \u00eatre attach\u00e9 \u00e0\nune r\u00e9f\u00e9rence bibliographique plus compl\u00e8te. Pour cr\u00e9er une telle\nr\u00e9f\u00e9rence, vous pouvez soit tenter de \u00abR\u00e9cup\u00e9rer les m\u00e9tadonn\u00e9es du\nPDF\u00bb, soit \u00abCr\u00e9er un document parent\u00bb \u00e0 remplir manuellement. Ces deux\noptions sont accessibles par un clic-droit sur le PDF. Dans une\nprochaine version, Zotero tentera de cr\u00e9er un \u00e9l\u00e9ment parent\nautomatiquement.
\nEn d\u00e9pit du nouveau bouton, certaines limitations\npersistent. Notons en deux. Premi\u00e8rement, tant que la page web\nn'a pas fini de charger dans Chrome, l'extension Zotero n'affiche que\nl'ic\u00f4ne grise de capture de page web, m\u00eame si la page contient une ou\nplusieurs r\u00e9f\u00e9rences bibliographiques. Deuxi\u00e8mement, la capture de page\nweb ne fonctionne pas si Zotero Standalone n'est pas ouvert. L\u00e0 aussi,\nune am\u00e9lioration est pr\u00e9vue et une future version permettra\nd'enregistrer des pages web directement dans votre compte zotero.org\nquand Standalone n'est pas ouvert (comme c'est d\u00e9j\u00e0 le cas pour les\nautres types de r\u00e9f\u00e9rences).
\nSi vous avez install\u00e9 la derni\u00e8re version de Chrome, votre extension\nZotero devrait \u00eatre mise \u00e0 jour automatiquement. Si vous n'utilisez pas\nactuellement Zotero avec Chrome, vous pouvez
1. \u00c0 condition toutefois que vous disposiez de\nla version 4.0.29 ou sup\u00e9rieure de Zotero Standalone.
Over the past decade, Open Science has transformed the way we create, share, and evaluate research. Among the many domains of Open Science (Bertram et al. 2023), two have received growing attention: open data and open peer review.
Yet these two worlds do not often meet.
We regularly discuss the importance of sharing data to support transparency, reproducibility, and reuse (Wilkinson et al. 2016). We also explore new approaches to peer review that are more open, inclusive, and collaborative (Ross-Hellauer et al. 2023). But we rarely stop to ask what happens when datasets themselves become the subject of review.
Recent initiatives have begun exploring ways to connect open data and open peer review (Modular Peer Review; Sansing and Wilkinson 2025). One notable development came in November 2025, when PREreview introduced support on their platform for reviewing datasets deposited in Dryad, an open-access general-purpose data repository. It is in this context that the FORCE11 PREreview Club was invited to pilot a collaborative and structured dataset review process. Our review of the dataset, \"Leverage metrics to drive data sharing at the Science journals\" by Valda Vinson and Lauren Kmec (2025), is now posted on PREreview and archived on Zenodo (Akuma et al. 2026). It is the first open review of a dataset shared on PREreview.
In this blog post, we reflect on that experience, discuss what we learned, and consider the opportunities of dataset review as an emerging scholarly practice.
The Vinson and Kmec dataset (2025) focuses on data and code-sharing practices in articles published by Science. At first glance, it seemed like an ideal case study: data deposited in an open repository, documentation available for users, and a topic closely connected to Open Science itself.
As our discussion unfolded, however, it became clear that reviewing a dataset involves different questions from those we typically ask when reviewing a preprint or a journal article. Rather than focusing solely on findings or conclusions, we found ourselves examining the processes behind the data. How were key variables constructed? How transparent were the classification methods? What assumptions shaped the dataset? How reproducible was the workflow? And what limitations should future users keep in mind when reusing the data?
Very quickly, the conversation moved into topics such as FAIR and CARE principles, metadata quality, methodological transparency, provenance, responsible reuse, and the implications of using automated systems to measure Open Science practices.
In a sense, the review became a metascientific exercise: a group of researchers evaluating a dataset designed to measure behaviors associated with Open Science itself. What began as a discussion about a dataset soon became a broader conversation about trust, transparency, and how we assess research outputs beyond traditional publications.
One of the most rewarding aspects of the experience was the diversity of perspectives involved in the review. The review brought together researchers based in India, Mexico, T\u00fcrkiye, the United Kingdom, and the United States, with backgrounds spanning scholarly communication, research assessment, bibliometrics, data management, and Open Science.
Although we were all reviewing the same dataset, we examined it through vastly different lenses. Some participants focused on reproducibility and workflow validation. Others paid closer attention to metadata quality, cross-publisher comparisons, methodological transparency, or the broader ethical and geopolitical implications of data reuse.
These different and diverse perspectives enriched the discussion. Together, they helped us develop a more nuanced understanding of the dataset, its strengths, and its limitations than any one of us could likely have achieved alone.
This collaborative process also highlighted one of the strengths of open, collaborative peer review. When reviewers bring different experiences, disciplinary backgrounds, and regional perspectives to the table, evaluation becomes more than quality control\u2014it becomes a form of collegial discourse and collective learning.
Perhaps the most important lesson for us was seeing how open review can help bridge the distance between data producers and data users.
One of the greatest challenges in data reuse is not simply gaining access to data, but understanding the context in which the data were created, the decisions that shaped them, and the limitations that accompany their use. Datasets rarely speak entirely for themselves. Even well-documented data often leave room for questions about methods, assumptions, and interpretation.
Open review creates a space where those questions can be raised collectively, transparently, and constructively. It also provides an opportunity for data producers and data users to engage in dialogue, helping to clarify uncertainties, identify issues that may affect reuse, and strengthen future versions of a dataset.
The experience also reminded us that making data available is not the same as making data understandable, reusable, or trustworthy for every purpose. Openness requires infrastructure, but it also requires documentation, clear licensing, robust metadata, methodological transparency, and ongoing dialogue with the communities that may eventually reuse the data. As datasets evolve through updates, corrections, and new versions, community feedback can play an important role in supporting their long-term reusability.
In other words, depositing a dataset in a repository is not the end of the story. Rather, it marks the beginning of a new phase for data to become part of the broader scientific discourse. Once shared, datasets can be scrutinized, debated, and critiqued, just like preprints and journal articles. Through review and reuse, datasets can contribute to the refinement of existing knowledge, the generation of new insights, and the advancement of future research.
This experience also reminded us that Open Science extends beyond open access to publications. While open access remains one of its most visible achievements, practices such as open data, open peer review, and responsible data reuse are equally important for building a more transparent and collaborative research ecosystem.
Our open dataset review pilot for PREreview does not answer every question about how research data should be evaluated. But it does demonstrate something important: open data and open review are not separate practices.
When combined, they create new opportunities to strengthen transparency, accountability, and reuse across the research ecosystem. Open data makes reuse possible. Open review helps us understand what we are reusing, how it was created, and what limitations we should keep in mind. Together, they move us closer to a vision of Open Science that extends beyond access alone\u2014one that values not only the availability of research outputs, but also the conversations, feedback, and collective stewardship that help make those outputs meaningful and reusable.
Finally, we would like to thank Jennifer M. Miller for her thoughtful coordination of the review and collaborative writing process, as well as Daniela Saderi and the PREreview team for creating and continuously improving spaces where open and community-driven approaches to research assessment can flourish.
Perhaps that is the most valuable lesson from this experience: opening data matters, but opening the conversation around data can be just as transformative.
After I abandoned the no-AI-for-a-month thing, I'm making up for lost time here. Only thing is now that I'm doing some fairly long-horizon multiagent work in Claude Code and Cowork, I'm frequently blowing through my session limit with just one or two prompts. I've written about this session limit anxiety before.
I'm an early morning person. My typical morning will start with a run or ride or sauna at 5am, and some work (personal projects and day-job work) at around ~6-7 before the camp/school shuffle, and the bike into work. If I do some work with Claude at around 7:00am, my five-hour session limit starts and I typically hit my session limit quickly, which locks me into extra usage at API rates until 12:00pm. Assuming I start another session around noon, that'll extend until 5pm, when I'm normally wrapping things up and heading home. I.e., I'll get two five-hour sessions at most over the course of a normal workday.
I'm short-circuiting that with a little hack. I set my Mac to wake up every morning at 3:58am, and at 4:00am it'll run claude -p \"hey\". That -p flag just tells Claude to print the output of running the prompt, which in this case is \"hey\". It barely uses any tokens, with Claude responding with something like \"hey what's up?\".
But the point is, now my session starts at 4am (instead of 7am), and resets at 9am (instead of 12pm), right about the time I'm settling into the office and getting back to work. Assuming I kick off another session-consuming prompt at 9am, that opens the door to a third session that starts at 2pm. The whole point is now I can get three full 5 hour sessions in a single workday instead of two if I kick off a session very early, effectively shortening my first \"session\" to 2 hours instead of 5.1
I haven't used a Windows computer since Windows 98, so if you're not on Mac, ask Claude how to do this on Windows (Linux is easy with cron). On MacOS I'm using a Launch Agent.
First, set your mac to automatically wake up at 3:58am. Or whenever. Move this forward or backward depending on your daily routine. Point is to have this kick off a prompt a few hours before you really get to work.
# Set an automatic wake every day at 3:58am\nsudo pmset repeat wake MTWRFSU 03:58:00\n# Test - make sure it works\npmset -g schedThen add a launch agent (like a cron job).
vim ~Library/LaunchAgents/us.stephenturner.claudeping.plistCopy the text below into this file. Replace /Users/sdt5z/.local/bin/claude on line 11 with whatever is returned when you run which claude. You'll need to use a full path for this to work.
<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC \"-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN\" \"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd\">\n<plist version=\"1.0\">\n<dict>\n <key>Label</key>\n <string>us.stephenturner.claudeping</string>\n <key>ProgramArguments</key>\n <array>\n <string>/bin/bash</string>\n <string>-lc</string>\n <string>/Users/sdt5z/.local/bin/claude -p \"hey\"</string>\n </array>\n <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>\n <dict>\n <key>Hour</key><integer>4</integer>\n <key>Minute</key><integer>0</integer>\n </dict>\n <key>StandardOutPath</key>\n <string>/tmp/claudeping.log</string>\n <key>StandardErrorPath</key>\n <string>/tmp/claudeping.err</string>\n</dict>\n</plist>\nTest, make sure it works (replace paths/filenames with whatever you called them).
# Tear down the service if it already exists\nlaunchctl bootout gui/$(id -u)/us.stephenturner.claudeping 2>/dev/null\n# Build it again\nlaunchctl bootstrap gui/$(id -u) ~/Library/LaunchAgents/us.stephenturner.claudeping.plist\n# Force the service to start\nlaunchctl kickstart -k gui/$(id -u)/us.stephenturner.claudeping\n# You're looking for an exit code 0\nlaunchctl print gui/$(id -u)/us.stephenturner.claudeping | grep -iE 'last exit|runs'\n# See the logs\ncat /tmp/claudeping.log /tmp/claudeping.errThat's it. Enjoy that extra session while subscription-based subsidized usage lasts!
Yes, I fully realize that I sound like a tokenmaxxing workaholic writing it out this way. I'm not using Claude Code 15 hours per day. In reality while using Opus or Fable you're going to hit a session limit on a $20 plan very quickly. This essentially gives me 3 windows to use Claude at subscription rates instead of 2 windows. Soon enough I'm sure everything's going to be metered at API rates, but for now I'm just trying to take advantage of those VC token subsidies while I can.
Tim Rakow recently published work that \"investigates the claim that psychological scientists have published only a small quantity of replication research (Chambers, 2017; Ioannidis, 2012).\" He found that 19% of the 1,224 psychology articles examined explicitly referred to \"replication\" in their studies, although \"direct replications were less common than conceptual replications and replications with extension.\"
Rakow's work reminds me of a theoretical paper by Stephan Guttinger (2018) arguing that replications are everywhere. Guttinger identified what he called \"micro-replications\" in which researchers \"reproduce an earlier finding of another group using their own materials and methods.\" Critically, however, authors do not label these micro-replications as \"replications\" in their work. Hence, they do not tend to be picked up in surveys of the prevalence of replications. As Guttinger explained,
the current debate about the reproducibility crisis is completely blind to the additional level of micro-replications, as the analytic framework used only thinks of replications as add-ons and not as part of regular experimentation.
Guttinger concluded that:
There might be less need to fundamentally revise the experimental sciences than current talk of a 'crisis' often implies. There is good reason to assume that (successful) replications are much more prevalent
Rakow's work adds to Guttinger's by showing that, in addition to unmentioned micro-replications, researchers also often explicitly report what they term \"replications.\" Hence, Rakow concluded that:
Many researchers are not shy about conducting and reporting replication. Plausibly, at least 20% of psychology articles include author-identified replication; and replication could be considered to be a mainstream practice in experimental psychology. Nonetheless, recommendations for improving replication practices remain relevant because psychology might not be leveraging the full range of benefits afforded by different kinds of replication study (H\u00fcffmeier et al., 2016; Schmidt, 2009). Because conceptual replications appear to be far more common than direct replications, the priority likely lies with greater use of direct replications.
Rakow's point about the rarity of direct replications is well taken. Beth Clarke and colleagues (2026) recently analysed 100 top psychology journals and found that \"only 0.2% of articles (169 articles out of 84,834) were direct replication articles.\"
So, are replications rare? It depends how you define a \"replication\"! If you mean any case in which researchers replicate a phenomenon, potentially using somewhat different methods (i.e., in conceptual replications and extensions), then no, they're not that rare. But if you restrict your definition to cases in which researchers deliberately set out to conduct direct replication attempts using what they presume to be the same methods and to report their results in dedicated direct replication articles, then yes, they're rare, at least in top journals.
Finally, it is interesting to see Clarke et al. step back to considered the more critical question: What direct replication rate do we actually want?
We recommend that each journal consider what replicability rate they are aiming for, advertise this as one of the journal's aims, and invest in or solicit enough replication studies to assess whether they are meeting their goal. For example, is the journal's aim to publish results that are very definitive (low risk of false positives/negatives) or groundbreaking (high risk of false positives/negatives)? As Srivastava (2011) has argued, articles can rarely be both. We believe that most journals have at least an implicit goal for balancing this trade-off. We encourage journals to make this goal explicit and to invest in replication studies to gauge how well they are meeting their goals.
As I've discussed previously, determining desired replication rates is tricky! But it's encouraging to see metascientists starting to grapple with this important issue (for recent work, see Harper & Sch\u00f6nbrodt, 2026).
Clarke, B., Lee, P. Y. (K.), Schiavone, S. R., Rhemtulla, M., & Vazire, S. (2026). The prevalence of direct replication articles in top-ranking psychology journals. American Psychologist, 81(2), 238\u2013253. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001385
Guttinger, S. (2018). Replications everywhere: Why the replication crisis might be less severe than it seems at first. BioEssays, 40, Article 1800055. https://doi.org/10.1002/bies.201800055
Rakow, T. (2026). Estimating the prevalence of replication research Is challenging, not least because even a thorough database search can be shallow. Perspectives on Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916261452961
Aaron Erlich wrote a blog post questioning whether the time it takes to publish Registered Reports is longer than that for standard articles. As he explains:
There is no published study comparing time-to-publication for registered reports against standard articles. The literature has measured the format's quality (reviewers rated registered reports higher on all nineteen criteria tested), its rate of null results (about 44 per cent of registered-report hypotheses supported, against roughly 96 per cent of results in standard psychology articles), its citations, and how many journals offer it. Nobody has measured the clock. The nearest work asks researchers what they think the cost is: Sarafoglou and colleagues surveyed 355 researchers on preregistration and got \"better science but more work\"; Imai and colleagues surveyed 519 experimental economists and found that more than 80 per cent know what a registered report is, most approve of them \u2014 and adoption is near zero. Neither asked anyone for a date.
He concludes, \"if anyone is interested in trying to collect this data more systematically for political science, please let me know.\"
You can contact Aaron at aaron.erlich@mcgill.ca
Erlich, A. (2026, August 28). Registered reports are available in political science and used almost nowhere. Blog. https://aaronerlich.com/posts/2026-08-registered-reports/?lang=en
Hilmar Brohmer and colleagues investigated the myside bias, general trust in science, and the communication of open science practices as predictors of public trust in scientific findings that are communicated through popular-scientific media articles. They found that \"general trust in science and myside bias strongly predicted trust in certain popular-scientific summaries, while explicit Open Science cues did not show an effect.\" Perhaps this is because open science \"practices are perceived as the default, [and so] explicitly mentioning them may offer little additional benefit in terms of increasing trust (Anvari & Lakens, 2018)\"?
As the authors explained:
We found that OS [open science] practices did not affect trust in the scientific findings, neither individually, nor in interaction with other variables, implying no evidence for either tested hypothesis. This calls into question whether it is necessary to comprehensively report in layperson texts whether or not OS was applied.
Brohmer, H., Gehm, F., & von G\u00f6tz, S. (2026). Believing what we want? Myside bias and the role of open science practices in public trust in science. Science Communication. https://doi.org/10.1177/10755470261475540
Based on Simonsohn (2020), Yong Cai and colleagues distinguish between \"slow\" p-hacking (e.g., selective data transformation and outlier identification in the same data set) and \"fast\" p-hacking (e.g., file-drawering and then using a new data set). They argue that fast p-hacking exacerbates both strong and weak publication bias, and slow p-hacking exacerbates weak publication bias. However, slow p-hacking may also operate as a form of self-correction by mitigating the effects of strong publication bias (see also Friese & Frankenbach, 2020).
Cai et al. conclude:
Our results show that it is important to understand p-hacking in the context of the selection environment that produced it. That p-hacking could mitigate the effects of publication bias under extreme selection also hints at a self-correcting tendency in the scientific process.
Cai, Y., Pernoud, A., & Xu, B. (2026). Does p-hacking mitigate or exacerbate the effects of publication bias? ArXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.05372
Unsere monatliche Rubrik zu aktuellen Veranstaltungen rund um Open Research.
\nAnmerkung zu dieser Rubrik: Das Open Research Office Berlin erstellt monatlich eine \u00dcbersicht \u00fcber Termine und Veranstaltungen zu Open Access und Open Research in Berlin bzw. an Berliner Einrichtungen. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf unseren Partnereinrichtungen und auf Veranstaltungen, die sich an die \u00d6ffentlichkeit richten bzw. die offen sind f\u00fcr Angeh\u00f6rige der Wissenschafts- und Kulturerbeeinrichtungen in Berlin. Wir erg\u00e4nzen diese Liste gerne (Info bitte via Mail ans OROB).\n\n
LLMs k\u00f6nnen die Nutzung fortgeschrittener Funktionen und Tools erleichtern oder \u00fcberhaupt erst erm\u00f6glichen. Sie helfen dabei, anspruchsvolle Excel-Funktionen zu schreiben, SQL- und SPARQL-Queries zu formulieren, mit komplexen regul\u00e4ren Ausdr\u00fccken zu arbeiten, Dateien \u00fcber die Kommandozeile zu verwalten oder kleine Code-Schnipsel zu generieren. LLMs k\u00f6nnen z.B. auch in OpenRefine eingebunden werden und bei der Strukturierung von Information helfen. LLMs k\u00f6nnen hier helfen, es bedarf jedoch grundlegender Kenntnisse der zu Gebote stehenden Werkzeuge. Dar\u00fcber soll im Workshop gesprochen werden. Ebenso werden wir uns \u00fcber die Grenzen und Risiken des Einsatzes von LLMs unterhalten.
\nDieser Workshop zielt darauf ab, in die besonderen ethischen, rechtlichen und praktischen Herausforderungen im Management qualitativer Forschungsdaten einzuf\u00fchren \u2013 z. B. in Bezug auf Datenschutz, informierte Einwilligung, Anonymisierung, Dokumentation und Data Sharing \u2013 und zeigt dabei bew\u00e4hrte Praktiken sowie Beispiele f\u00fcr ein erfolgreiches FDM auf. Die Veranstaltung richtet sich insbesondere an Sozialwissenschaftler*innen, die mit qualitativen Methoden und Daten arbeiten.
\nDie Kultur im KI-Zeitalter. Wird der Traum vom niedrigschwelligen digitalen Zugang zu Bibliotheken, Archiven und Museen nun Realit\u00e4t \u2013 oder entstehen neue Abh\u00e4ngigkeiten? Und welche Verantwortung tragen Staat, Kulturinstitutionen und die gro\u00dfen Technologieunternehmen?
\nWie geht es weiter mit den Berliner Hochschulen? Welche wissenschaftspolitischen Schwerpunkte setzen die Parteien nach der Abgeordnetenhauswahl? Und wie wollen sie gute Arbeits- und Studienbedingungen sowie eine zukunftsf\u00e4hige Hochschullandschaft sichern? Vertreter*innen der demokratischen Parteien im Berliner Abgeordnetenhaus diskutieren ihre Konzepte f\u00fcr die n\u00e4chste Legislaturperiode und stellen sich den Fragen aus Wissenschaft und Hochschule.
\nThe webinar brings together three scholars whose work engages critically and theoretically with openness in history, cultural heritage and the humanities, addressing questions of data governance, research reproducibility, open infrastructures, and the epistemological challenges of working with historical and cultural heritage data. While the emphasis is on theoretical and conceptual perspectives, the presentations also draw on examples and case studies from the speakers' own research. We see this webinar as a space to think together about the tensions and opportunities of openness in the humanities: not only what open research standards call for, but what they mean in practice for historical and heritage scholarship, where sources, data and interpretation are entangled in particular ways.
\nVielleicht bist Du bereits auf Mastodon, Pixelfed oder PeerTube unterwegs. Vielleicht entwickelst Du selbst Anwendungen oder besch\u00e4ftigst Dich mit dezentralen sozialen Netzen aus aktivistischen Gr\u00fcnden, in der Forschung oder als Verbreitungsweg f\u00fcr Deine Kunst. Egal, ob Du Poweruser bist oder komplett #neuhier: Das Programm bietet vom Einsteigerworkshop bis zu Panels und Party alles, was zu einer guten Hackerkonferenz dazugeh\u00f6rt.
\nThis 1.5-day workshop explores how digital research, particularly in the context of non-Latin script languages, can move beyond the constraints of traditional scholarly formats. While books and articles remain central to academic knowledge production, many forms of computational research generate data, models, workflows, and analytical results that cannot be adequately represented through static text, images, or tables alone.
\nBibliotheken stehen mitten im Spannungsfeld aus Digitalisierung, KI und gesellschaftlichem Wandel. Doch genauso herausfordernd wie neue Technologien ist der Umgang mit dem eigenen Handeln \u2013 mit Erfolgen, aber vor allem auch mit Fehlentscheidungen. Diese Veranstaltung l\u00e4dt dazu ein, genau dort hinzuschauen: Wie k\u00f6nnen wir aus Erfahrungen \u2013 inklusive Scheitern \u2013 lernen, um aktiv die Zukunft von Bibliotheken zu gestalten?
\nInterested in open source and open science? Looking to improve your open science training curriculum?\u00a0Join us for an in-person workshop to test a new Library Carpentries course on open source hardware in research settings, and give feedback on how to make it more useful for you.
\nDie Open-Access-Tage sind die zentrale j\u00e4hrliche Konferenz zum Thema Open Access im deutschsprachigen Raum. Sie richtet sich an alle, die sich intensiv mit den M\u00f6glichkeiten, Bedingungen und Perspektiven des wissenschaftlichen Publizierens befassen. Dazu geh\u00f6ren Wissenschaftler*innenInnen sowie Mitarbeiter*innenInnen von Bibliotheken und anderen Einrichtungen der Wissenschaftsinfrastruktur ebenso wie Mitglieder der Wissenschaftsadministration und Verlage.
\nweiter zu Oktober 2026
","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/7147g-z9s75","guid":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/?p=4271","language":"de","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1786924800,"rid":"tj4rj-qf489","summary":"Unsere monatliche Rubrik zu aktuellen Veranstaltungen rund um Open Research. Anmerkung zu dieser Rubrik: Das Open Research Office Berlin erstellt monatlich eine \u00dcbersicht \u00fcber Termine und Veranstaltungen zu Open Access und Open Research in Berlin bzw. an Berliner Einrichtungen.","tags":["Allgemein","Veranstaltungshinweise"],"title":"Veranstaltungshinweise September 2026","updated_at":1788852607,"url":"https://blogs.fu-berlin.de/open-research-berlin/2026/08/17/veranstaltungshinweise-september-2026/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Hare","given":"Maddie"}],"blog":{"authors":[{"name":"Bibliomagician Staff"}],"community_id":"f5c1522e-c8de-4681-a317-e32ddb61b26a","created":1780876800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Comment & practical guidance from the LIS-Bibliometrics community","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/bibliomagician","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/f5c1522e-c8de-4681-a317-e32ddb61b26a/logo","feed_format":"application/atom+xml","feed_url":"https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/feed/atom","filter":null,"generator":"WordPress.com","home_page_url":"https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"bibliomagician","status":"active","subfield":"3309","title":"The Bibliomagician","updated":1788797687,"use_api":true},"blog_name":"The Bibliomagician","blog_slug":"bibliomagician","content_html":"Nathalie Corn\u00e9e & Kat Hart
\n\n\n\nCitations aren’t the only way research shows up in policy. Sometimes it’s a named researcher, a nod to “the evidence,” or a reference tucked into the text with no formal citation at all. Kat Hart and Nathalie Corn\u00e9e dug into Overton’s data to find out how often that happens, and what it means for how we understand research’s reach into policy.
\n\n\n\nWhen we want to know if research has influenced policy, we usually turn to citations. They’re easy to spot and easy to count, so it makes sense that they’ve become the go-to signal for research influence.
\n\n\n\nBut citations are only part of the story. Policymakers don’t always follow academic conventions. Sometimes they name a researcher directly, reference a report rather than the paper behind it, or they simply gesture at “the evidence” without pointing to anything specific at all.
\n\n\n\nSo, we set out to ask a simple question: if we look past formal citations, what else might be going on? Using Overton’s data, we compared the scale of formal citations against these more informal mentions and tried to get a sense of what the gap between them might look like. This is an exploratory pilot rather than a definitive study, as the sample is far too small to draw firm conclusions. We hope its value lies more in how it reframes the question of what counts as 'research engaging with policy' (and vice versa) in the first place.
\n\n\n\nDefinitions of research impact are shifting. A recent Australian study published on LSE's impact blog made a useful point on this: institutional definitions of impact often don’t match how researchers actually work (O'Connor et al., 2026). Instead of asking “did this have impact?”, the authors suggest asking “what value does this create, and for whom?” It’s a small shift in framing, but it moves the conversation from proving impact to understanding it.
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIf citation counts alone don’t capture the full picture, what other signals should we be paying attention to?
\n
We used the Overton Index as our starting point. At the time of the study, Overton indexed over 27 million policy documents from more than 190 countries and 3,100 sources, spanning everything from intergovernmental organisations like the UN and WHO to NGOs, think tanks, national governments, as well as regional and local bodies like Canadian provinces and UK devolved nations.
\n\n\n\nFor the pilot itself, we kept things deliberately focused. We took a random sample of 50 UK government policy documents from 2025 and used Overton’s AI classification to pull out document type, length, and authorship. Then came the manual part: we read and coded every single document by hand.
\n\n\n\nThis was a conscious choice. Automated tools are good at catching formal citations, but they miss the less obvious ways research shows up in policy text. We wanted to capture all of it, so we built a coding framework covering two broad categories:
\n\n\n\nFigure 1. Workflow for identifying and classifying attention to actors and objects in UK government policy documents.
\n\n\n\nFor each one, we recorded whether it was a citation (a formal, traceable reference) or a mention (an informal acknowledgement with no formal citation attached). Where a document referenced several things together, we logged each one individually rather than lumping them into a single entry. Across just 50 documents, that added up to over 2,200 individual references, which gave us plenty to work with despite the small sample size.
\n\n\n\nAcross our sample, we identified 2,244 objects and actors in total. Policy actors (think tanks, government bodies, IGOs) and policy evidence (past reports, transcripts, consultation outputs) were by far the most common categories in our data, together with in-house research accounting for around 75% of everything referenced.
\n\n\n\nPeer-reviewed publications, by comparison, made up just under 5% of all references. Generic, non-specific nods to “experts” or “previous research” outnumbered them, at around 9%. In other words, plenty of documents acknowledge that evidence exists somewhere, without pointing to anything specific.
\n\n\n\nPeer-reviewed articles were the type of evidence most likely to receive a full, formal citation. Commissioned research told a different story: it often got absorbed into the narrative (“the data suggests”, “interviews found”) with no formal attribution at all. Policy outputs sat somewhere in between, appearing as both citations and mentions in meaningful numbers.
\n\n\n\nAcross the whole sample, mentions were consistently more common than citations.
\n\n\n\nReferencing patterns varied a lot depending on who authored the document. Our five most prolific authors in the sample were the Department for Education, the Law Commission, UK Government more broadly, the Ministry of Justice, and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) together with the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA). Each had a distinct pattern of what they referenced and how often.
\n\n\n\nA working paper from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, written by commissioned academics, leaned heavily on peer-reviewed citations, as you’d expect. A similar paper from Technopolis, a consultancy commissioned by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), leaned instead on funder acknowledgements and commissioned research. Same document type, same broad government context, very different citation behaviour.
\n\n\n\nWe also tested the intuitive assumption that longer documents would contain more citations. They don’t, at least not cleanly. Some of the highest citation counts did appear in longer documents, but plenty of short documents cited heavily too, and plenty of long ones cited very little. There’s no straightforward relationship between page count and citation volume in this sample.
\n\n\n\nMost documents in our sample didn’t have a formal bibliography at all, relying on footnotes instead. And even where a reference qualified as a formal citation, it only had roughly a 50/50 chance of actually appearing in a bibliography rather than just the body text. Citation habits clearly vary a lot from one policymaker to another.
\n\n\n\nThe research being cited mostly comes from a small number of places
\n\n\n\nOf the peer-reviewed research we identified, half came from UK universities alone, 43% came from international institutions, and the rest reflected UK and international collaborations.
\n\n\n\nA few things stood out consistently across the sample:
\n\n\n\nTaken together, these early findings suggest that citation counts alone may only capture a part of how research reaches policy.
\n\n\n\nWhere we think this work is genuinely useful is in how it reframes the question. Right now, most tools only ask whether a policy document cited a piece of research or not. Splitting that into citations and mentions lets us ask a more useful question: how is research actually showing up, even when there’s no formal reference at all? That feels like a real gap worth exploring.
\n\n\n\nThe coding framework itself, sorting references into different types of evidence and different types of actors, and tagging each one as a citation or a mention, is a first step towards making that visible. It gives us a way to describe the kinds of engagement that citation counts alone may miss, so it’s a starting point for more work.
\n\n\n\nThis also fits with a broader pattern often noted in research impact literature: that scholarly expertise tends to reach policy indirectly, through reviews, consultations, and expert commentary, rather than through direct citation. That raises a genuinely open question: how much of what we’re seeing is a passing reference, and how much reflects real engagement with the research itself?
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBeing able to tell the difference matters if we want to understand not just whether research is being used, but how and why.
\n
This was a small, exploratory pilot, and we’re upfront about its limits. Fifty documents from one country over one year is a start, not a conclusion.
\n\n\n\nNext, we’d like to scale up the sample across a wider, more representative set of countries using an LLM to help with the coding. We’d also like to track whether the balance between citations and mentions is shifting over time and compare document types more systematically to understand whether citation behaviour is driven more by document function or by the authoring body. Beyond that, we want to develop ways to assess the depth of engagement behind a reference, not just whether it exists, and look at whether these patterns differ across policy domains, comparing something like health policy against education policy.
\n\n\n\nIf you have thoughts on this work, or you’re doing something similar, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch at nathalie@overton.io or kat@overton.io.
\n\n\n\nNathalie Corn\u00e9e helps the research and policy community around the world get the most out of Overton. She joined in 2023, bringing more than 20 years of experience across the pharma, research, and academic library sectors, always focused on highlighting the significance of research and supporting the researchers behind it, including through bibliometric analysis. She takes a practical, hands-on approach to helping users find the data they need and make sense of research impact.
\nKat Hart is a Senior Analyst at Overton, where she curates policy data and uses bibliometrics to explore evidence-use patterns worldwide. Alongside this, she’s a PhD researcher at the University of Nottingham, studying UK water governance. She previously worked as a knowledge broker in UK higher education, focused on ‘what works’ in connecting academic research with public policy.
\n Unless it states otherwise, the content of the Bibliomagician is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59350/74r3r-67451
\n\n\n\n","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/a3dpx-knp02","guid":"https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/?p=5646","image":"https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/image.png?w=770","language":"en","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","published_at":1788739200,"reference":[{"id":"https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2026/03/23/we-should-focus-less-on-research-impact-and-more-on-research-value/","unstructured":"O'Connor, R., Malde, S., Russell, W., & Haviland, M. (2026, March 23). We should focus less on research impact and more on research value. LSE Impact Blog."}],"rid":"xx8x7-m3t11","summary":"Nathalie Corn\u00e9e & Kat Hart Citations aren't the only way research shows up in policy. Sometimes it's a named researcher, a nod to \"the evidence,\" or a reference tucked into the text with no formal citation at all.","tags":["Altmetrics","Policy"],"title":"Cited or mentioned? What we learned about how research actually shows up in policy","updated_at":1788852606,"url":"https://thebibliomagician.wordpress.com/2026/09/07/cited-or-mentioned-what-we-learned-about-how-research-actually-shows-up-in-policy/","version":"v1"},{"authors":[{"contributor_roles":[],"family":"Jehn","given":"Florian Ulrich","url":"https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7296-8008"}],"blog":{"authors":null,"community_id":"86cf2e28-4644-41b0-9d6d-66444a612b18","created":1751500800,"current_feed_url":null,"description":"Thoughts about existential risk, history, climate, food security and societal collapse.","doi":"https://doi.org/10.59350/existentialcrunch","favicon":"https://rogue-scholar.org/api/communities/86cf2e28-4644-41b0-9d6d-66444a612b18/logo","feed_format":"application/rss+xml","feed_url":"https://existentialcrunch.substack.com/feed","filter":null,"generator":"Substack","home_page_url":"https://existentialcrunch.substack.com","issn":null,"language":"eng","license":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode","prefix":"10.59350","relative_url":null,"secure":true,"slug":"existentialcrunch","status":"active","subfield":"2306","title":"Existential Crunch","updated":1788851190,"use_api":null},"blog_name":"Existential Crunch","blog_slug":"existentialcrunch","content_html":"This post is part of a living literature review on societal collapse. You can find an indexed archive here.
After reading dozens and dozens of scientific papers about societal collapse, I wanted a new perspective on the topic. So, I read a lot of novels about societal collapse, as stories shape how we see the world and thus the action we take (1) (2). To my surprise, it turned out to be pretty hard to find books that actually take collapse seriously instead of just using it as a backdrop.
Collapse is a topic people like to tell stories about, as it grasps the imagination with what might be and how everything we have now might be gone in the future. I found the books by searching the internet and asking friends and colleagues for recommendations. This means there is no coherent set of criteria that makes a book collapse relevant, more a vibes based approach on what I and other people felt could be a collapse relevant book. Obviously, this is also not a complete list, so I'd be happy to hear further suggestions in the comments.
This post gives an overview of the books I have read, makes some recommendations on which ones are worth reading and describes what I have learned from reading them.
First, I will give a short overview of the books and what I thought about them. The list is roughly ordered by how much I would recommend reading them, starting with the ones I liked least and ending with my favorites.
The book starts with a great premise: How would the world have developed if the Black Death would have killed 99 % of the European population? And the first few chapters really hammer that home, as they tell the story of a lone warrior trying to survive, only ever finding ruins and death wherever he goes. But after that the book mostly forgets about what got it started, never really mentions that super plague again and instead tells an alternate history story of a monumental battle of cultures between China and an Islamized rest of the world in a connected set of short stories. Don't get me wrong, the book is not bad, but it was quite disappointing to me, as it does not really say anything about collapse, even though the premise would have been great for that. The alternate history of it is interesting, although it sometimes felt like he took the actual history and just replaced all entries of Europe with China. Some of the short stories were quite good and if you like alternate history, this one is still worth checking out.
This story follows the life of a young girl that grows up in a world that is in a slow collapse, likely induced by escalating climate change. Social order is breaking down and people revert more and more to barbarism. The main character is trying to create a new ideology of positive change to counteract this and over the length of the book gathers a ragtag group of other survivors. The world it describes is interesting, but remains quite vague, as the book really wants to focus on the thoughts and feelings of the main character. This makes the collapse element seem more like the backdrop in what is actually a coming of age story. So, it was an okay read for me, but ultimately not that interesting.
The world of this novel is one ravaged by climate change and rampant resource overuse. This has destabilized the world, which humanity tried to counteract by going all in on manipulating biology. Creating pigs to harvest human organs or brainless flesh tubes to produce meat, quickly and cheaply. The story is told from the perspective of Snowman, on of the few survivors of an engineered pandemic. Over the length of the book, it is slowly revealed that Snowman's childhood friend Crake is responsible for this. According to the Wikipedia entry Crake did this to save Earth from humanity, but while reading the book this did not become super clear to me and the whole release of the engineered pandemic felt somewhat random and unearned given the setup. The book is nicely written and good to read, but I did not find the characters super interesting and the societal collapse itself is only described very vaguely.
Here the attempt is to tell the story of humanity from the 1930s until the extinction of the last descendant of humankind. This happens via the last men contacting the author of the book from the future to write down the whole history. It is a very weird book. It reads less like fiction and more like a historical treatise from the future. And the author imagines a very wide variety of future humans ranging from flying humans, to ape humans and also humans that are only giant brains in a vat. You also really notice that this book was written by someone from the 1930s, because oh boy does Olaf Stapledon love eugenics. So many pages in this book are spent on describing how better versions of humanity are bred purposefully. Still, it is quite interesting as an historical document, as it shows how people in the 1930s envisioned the future. Also, it is interesting in how he describes how all the different past civilizations perished, some from resource overuse, some from moral failures or others by just being unlucky. Overall, a fascinating book, but not really that great to actually read.
Not really a book, but a longer short story. The idea is that Earth is suddenly hit by a super deadly pandemic, likely introduced by bioterrorism. Most people die within days, but large groups of sysadmins survive in their data centers, as a large cyber attack just before the pandemic hit all made them gather in their fortress-like data centers, where they are safe for a while due to filtered air and backup power. From those data centers they try to coordinate a response, but have a hard time going anywhere due to never ending discussions. The story itself is just fine, but I liked the focus on infrastructure and its importance. Also, it is always nice if people like sysadmins, who work on maintaining our current world, without ever being seen, get some recognition.
This book wants to tell a story about how human morality is only something rich countries can have, because we live in abundance. This abundance is disrupted by a new kind of virus that kills all grass species in the world. As this includes most of the major food crops, the result is global famine. The book follows a pretty normal English family and how they try to navigate a world that quickly goes from abundance to scarcity. I think the premise of the book is good, as I also think that without food humans might quickly get more aggressive and violent. However, the book does not really tell this change in a convincing manner. The main protagonist of the book just takes a few days to go from polite, boring dad to being completely fine with robbing and killing innocent people to advance his position. Also, it is super misogynistic for no reason. Still, I really liked the idea of what this book could have been, if it would have been better.
A post contraction world. Fossil fuel capitalism has run its course and left the Earth broken. There are only scarce reserves of oil and gas left and so society has reverted again to more mechanical labor. However, this is enhanced by massive bioengineering and there are many new species to take on some of the burden. However, this massive focus on bioengineering also has released many new diseases into the world and food crops have to be continuously adapted to stay valid. Due to this power is concentrated in a few bioengineering corporations that control most of the world. One of the remaining independent countries is Thailand. The book focuses on a set of characters that try to steer their life in better directions, while around them the country slowly degrades into civil war.
I think this book did a pretty good job in describing a plausible future. Everything seems alien, but you can see how today's society could end up in such a scenario. It also goes into a good amount of detail how such a society would work and how it would set different priorities that we do today. What stops this book from being more of a favorite is that the actual story it tells is somewhat meandering, forgets its own strands and then results in a very mid ending. Still, worth checking out just for world building.
This one was recommended to me by several people and I get why. I would not have expected this from a book about a global war against zombies, but this book is pretty good at thinking through how such a collapse would look like and what the consequences might be. It is told through interviews with survivors of the zombie war and describes what happened throughout the war in chronological order.
I am not sure how much I can actually learn from this about \"normal\" collapse, but it certainly was quite interesting to see how the author manages to describe how politics, military tactics or economics change if suddenly the biggest threat to humanity are millions upon millions of zombies.
The reason why this did not make it further in the ranking is that the writing seemed pretty repetitive to me. While the book claims to interview a large group of different people from very different backgrounds, they all sound and feel very similarly, which gets a bit exhausting over the length of the book.
This is essentially Silent Spring, the novel. It is set in a near-future USA where environmental pollution has reached unprecedented heights. In most places you cannot go outside without a filter mask, children are born deformed because of the toxins they are exposed to before birth, and social discontent is brewing because people are no longer willing to tolerate this. The story follows a wide cast of characters: people who just want to make a living and ignore how dysfunctional society is getting around them, regenerative farmers who want to build their own isolated commune, and a reporter trying to push for better governance with the help of an activist leader. Around them society crumbles as people's health declines and the social fabric frays, because nobody believes in a better world anymore.
The book feels a bit like an artifact from another timeline. I can clearly see how somebody writing this in 1972 would see this kind of environmental degradation as the logical end point of the trajectory the USA was on. But it turned out differently, and while the USA is still pretty good at polluting the environment, laws and regulations hemmed it in and made the future in the book much less likely. So in a way it is a positive experience to read this, as it describes a bad future we managed to avoid. The way the book describes society slowly falling apart also felt like a good description to me, as it does not rush the way Death of Grass does. The writing, though, feels a bit janky and took me time to get used to. After the first few chapters I almost decided to skip the book, but now I am happy that I finished it.
Climate change, its consequences and possible solutions are the theme here. In the near future the ministry for the future is founded, which has the task of representing future generations and pushing for projects that allow those future generations a better life. The book mostly follows the head of the ministry and her struggles to actually get things done while facing massive resistance and a former aid worker who gets traumatized by having to live through a deadly heat wave and tries to understand his fate.
This seems to be the most well known collapse relevant novel. If you haven't read it, it is very worth picking up. If you have little time, just read the first chapters about the Indian heat wave. This is the best part of the book and also the most haunting one. The book is very detailed and drills down into the details of what proposals could actually stop climate change and the consequences of us failing to do so in time.
This book is part of a longer series about species uplifting, but it can be read on its own. The plot revolves around a new colony on an exoplanet that is quite hostile to life. It follows the colonizers in their struggle to wrestle a life from the hostile environment. The book is really good in highlighting how hard agriculture is and how much can go wrong, especially in an environment that is not well suited to it. As the situation of the colony gets more and more dire the book shows how the settlers get less and less trusting and putting ever more force into law and order.
I feel like this book does well what Death of Grass tried and failed. Showing that food is the foundation of society and how humans that start trusting and cooperative quickly cease to do so when food gets really scarce. The book also has quite some interesting turns and twists, but I don't want to spoil too much.
Really loved this book. It is the story of two societies and how they organize their political and economic life, told through the eyes of a scientist who visits both of them, but is originally from the anarchist society. The first society is organized as an aristocratic, capitalist society, seeming like a mixture of the UK during the industrial revolution and Cold War USA. The rich suppress the poor, the latter ultimately stage an anarchist revolution and to find peace, they are allowed to resettle to a nearby moon, which is barely habitable. On this moon they start a new society focussed on sharing, consent and ending suppression. Just as the colony in Children of Memory they struggle with the environment and face hunger, but ultimately make it through by the strength of their shared solidarity. Still, this society is not safe from problems either, as even if there is no formal governance, humans easily fall back into power hierarchies and work against the shared solidarity.
The book is really good in contrasting the anarchist society with the capitalist one. Both work as the mirror for the other, showing their shortcomings and where they fail their own values. Ultimately, the anarchist one seems like the much more liveable place, but it is constantly in danger of failing, as it is a constant negotiation between everyone involved. But at least discussion is possible, while in the hierarchy all dissent is violently suppressed.
While none of the societies involved collapses, I think this book is still relevant, as it is so good in contrasting different forms of governance, where they fail and where they succeed, plus the bonus of again highlighting the importance of food. Only in this book the societal bonds are only strained and not broken.
If society collapsed and we found the remains of our modern world decades later, would we be able to decipher what those remains even meant? What would we do with them? Could we still use it to rebuild? These are the questions this book tries to answer. It follows a group of monks over thousands of years as society tries to rebuild after a nuclear war. The monks have made it their task to preserve artifacts and books from the past, even though they do not know how to understand them. They merely keep on copying them, because they think they might prove valuable again in the future.
I enjoyed this book because I feel like it gives a realistic vision of how the world might look after a nuclear war. Humanity would be shattered, but probably not broken. Given enough time, it might restart, especially if some of the previous knowledge is conserved. However, the book also asks the question if humanity would learn from something like that, or if we would simply start to prepare for the next annihilation by our own hands.
The Road does not even mention which catastrophe befell humanity, though it very much seems like nuclear winter. The only thing we know is that things are really, really bad. The book follows a father and a son on their trek through a totally devastated America. They are aiming to find a place where life is better, all while trying to not sacrifice their own morals for their survival.
This book is bleak. Likely the bleakest book I have ever read. But it is so extremely well written that I could not put it down. While it does not teach you anything about how a society might collapse, it teaches you a lot about how horrible it would be if it happened, which is also an important lesson. And still, through all this darkness, it manages to always keep a sliver of hope going, that a better life might still be possible, even in the worst of times.
Wow, what a book. The Deluge explores the next few decades of how climate change might shape our world. It tells a story of activists, corporate advertisers, scientists, government officials and many more, and how all of them try to make sense of an ever more chaotic world and push their agendas forward in it. Everybody has their own ideas of what should be done to steer the USA through the turbulent times of more storms, more heat, more violence, more war, more misinformation. These range from eco-socialism and green growth capitalism to a fascist theocracy.
I was really impressed by how this book handled so many parallel storylines at once and how it braided them together into a very scary, yet always plausible narrative of how the coming decades will play out. I also really liked how it dug deep into how this all shifts and disrupts society and its narratives. It does this deep dive while also managing to be a very good read throughout, with many relatable and three dimensional characters. I think this is my favorite so far, because it explores changes on a societal level, while at the same time being simply a very good and engaging book that tells a cautionary tale of what might await us all quite soon.
While I enjoyed reading all these books about collapse and catastrophe, I am a bit unsure how much I have actually learned while doing so. I started a project to have a new angle on the topics I usually cover. But I had to start wondering if many of these authors take collapse as a topic seriously. For me this would mean that the book really tackles the problems that collapse causes. How do people adapt? How do institutions shift? How are morals under pressure?
For many of the books, you have this one big, defining catastrophe that ends the world or at least completely whacks it out of balance. The book focuses on the catastrophe in some detail in the first few chapters, but then many kind of forget the catastrophe they started the book with? Take Years of Rice and Salt; it starts with the premise of a super deadly pandemic that wipes out all of Europe and the descriptions in some of the earlier chapters are haunting and interesting, but for the following ~700 pages it just is not really a topic anymore.
It seems to me that many of the books here just use the catastrophe as a kind of motivator for the plot. The books are not really about collapse, instead they want to tell a specific story and they want to place it in a collapse scenario, as this gives their protagonists a reason to do stuff. Most often they seem to want to tell a kind of cautionary tale, along the lines of: \"Do humans really have morality or is this just something we can have now, because we are not on the verge of dying?\". And this is not an uninteresting question and some books, especially The Road, really try to answer this on a deep level, but then we have a story about human nature and not a story about how a society might cope with catastrophic conditions.
Maybe I just approached this the wrong way, because I wanted to learn something about collapse using fiction? I do not think so, as there are some books that at least gave a glimpse of what I was looking for. I think the book that did this best was The Deluge.The detailed story over decades in a world reeling under climate really felt like I was learning how we might cope or fail to do so. A Canticle for Leibowitz was also great. It really tries to think through how a society after a nuclear war could cope and how over time even the simplest artifacts from the past could seem like magic, as the reset society does not have the same understanding of the world anymore. Also pretty good in this regard were World War Z and The Sheep Look Up, as they cleanly describes what happens in reaction to this big catastrophe on many levels of society. Though, both are a bit lacking in how they tell their stories.
Looking at which books worked for me and which did not, the best predictor seems to be how much a book focuses on individual actors versus institutions and movements. A narrative usually wants to focus on one or few main protagonists, but collapse happens at the scale of systems. The books that gave me the most insight are exactly the ones that found ways around this. A Canticle for Leibowitz follows an institution over centuries instead of a person, The Deluge tells a decades long story about many characters, each embedded in different institutions and circumstances World War Z replaces protagonists with dozens of interview voices, The Sheep Look Up also has a large cast of characters and The Dispossessed is built around comparing two whole societies. At first The Road looks like it breaks this pattern, as it only ever focuses on two people and still felt quite valuable to me. But I think it provides a different kind of insight. It does not teach you anything about how collapse works, it teaches you why it matters and how horrible it would be. So maybe there are two things fiction can offer here: insight into the dynamics of collapse and insight into its stakes. The systems focused books provide the former, The Road the latter.
The timeline of a book also plays a role. Collapse of a society and the subsequent adaptation necessarily takes longer than a week and if this is the amount of time a book covers, well the collapse insights can only ever be surface level. So, this likely has to be months or rather years or decades. Though, you can also lose the plot in the other direction, as Last and First Men shows. If you are looking at billions of years, everything can only be a fantasy.
Still, I think this project was worth it and I will keep on reading these kinds of fiction books. They might not have been what I was originally looking for, but it certainly was interesting reading them (or at least most of them). And maybe there are more of the kinds of books I am looking for out there? If you know any, please let me know in the comments, I would love to put them on my reading list. Especially books that cover topics besides climate change, pandemics and nuclear war.
Thanks for reading! If you want to talk about this post or societal collapse in general, I'd be happy to have a chat. Just send me a mail to existential_crunch at posteo.de and we can schedule something.
(1) See this post for a detailed argument on why visions of the future are so important for the present.
(2) If you want yet another perspective on the topics, I can also recommend checking out this excellent reading of Lord Byron's Darkness.
Jehn, F. U. (2026, September 8). Learning about collapse from novels. Existential Crunch. https://doi.org/10.59350/ekqqw-80e32
Atwood, M. (2009). Oryx And Crake. Virago.
Bacigalupi, P. (2009). The Windup Girl. Orbit.
Brooks, M. (2006). World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. Del Rey.
Brunner, J. (1972). The Sheep Look Up. Harper & Row.
Butler, O. E. (1993). Parable of the sower.
Christopher, J. (1956). The Death of Grass.
Doctorow, C. (2007). When the Sysadmins ruled the Earth.
Markley, S. (2023). The Deluge. Simon & Schuster.
Le Guin, U. K. (1974). The dispossessed.
McCarthy, C. (2006). The Road.
Miller, W. (1959). A Canticle for Leibowitz.
Robinson, K. S. (2002). The Years of Rice and Salt. Del Rey.
Robinson, K. S. (2020). The ministry for the future. Orbit.
Stapledon, O. (1930). Last and first men.
Tchaikovsky, A. (2023). Children of memory. Orbit.
Spatial machine learning has become a standard tool for producing environmental and geographic prediction maps. It is now relatively (technically) easy to combine field observations with remote sensing, climate, terrain, or other predictor layers and fit a strong machine learning model. The harder question is whether the resulting map is reliable, transferable, and reproducible.
\nIn our paper, Navigating challenges in spatial machine learning: validation, uncertainty, algorithms, and reproducibility, we discuss this question from several connected angles. The paper was written by Jakub Nowosad, Carmelo Bonannella, Darius G\u00f6rgen, Marta Jemeljanova, Teja Kattenborn, Jan Linnenbrink, Hanna Meyer, Madlene Nussbaum, Luca Patelli, Rolf Simoes, and Evelyn Uuemaa1, and published in Erdkunde.
\nThe main argument is that spatial machine learning cannot simply reuse standard machine learning habits without modification. Spatial dependence, clustered and biased sampling, heterogeneous landscapes, and domain transfer all affect how models should be evaluated and interpreted. A model can appear accurate under a standard validation approach and still be unreliable where predictions are needed.
\nWe structure the paper around six themes:
\n
Several practical messages follow from this. Validation should match the intended prediction scenario, and prediction-domain adaptive evaluation approaches can help when sticking just to simple random or spatial cross-validation is not appropriate. When training data do not represent the prediction domain, areas outside the model's area of applicability should be identified, masked, or at least communicated clearly. Performance should not be reduced to a single global number: residual maps, spatial patterns of error, uncertainty, and thinking of the goal of the analysis are all important.
\nThe paper also highlights that algorithmic progress alone is not enough. We need benchmark datasets with different spatial properties, clearer comparisons against baseline methods, better uncertainty frameworks, and software that makes robust spatial workflows easier to apply. R currently has several dedicated tools for spatial machine learning workflows, while Python has a strong general-purpose machine learning ecosystem but fewer mature implementations of spatial-specific methods. In both languages, reproducibility still depends heavily on careful reporting of data preparation, resampling, prediction, software versions, and computational choices.
\nThe final part of the paper argues for standardized reporting protocols for spatial machine learning. Such protocols could help researchers document modeling aims, spatial characteristics of the data, validation design, uncertainty treatment, computational requirements, and reproducibility materials. This is also connected to ongoing work on the Spatio-Temporal Modelling Protocol (STeMP).
\n\n\nThe short version is this: spatial machine learning needs to move beyond performance-driven mapping toward workflows that are spatially explicit, uncertainty-aware, and reproducible. Better models are useful, but better evaluation, clearer uncertainty communication, stronger software, and transparent reporting are equally important.
\n
And builds partly on discussions from the Advances in Spatial Machine Learning 2025 workshop. Many thanks to the workshop participants for their feedback and ideas!\u21a9\ufe0e
@online{nowosad2026,\n author = {Nowosad, Jakub},\n title = {Navigating {Challenges} in {Spatial} {Machine} {Learning}},\n date = {2026-09-08},\n url = {https://jakubnowosad.com/posts/2026-09-08-erdkunde/},\n langid = {en}\n}\nThe Rogue Scholar science blog archive has now archived all its currently 55,730 blog posts as PDF files. These PDF files use the archival PDF/A-3A format and include the full-text HTML blog post with metadata embedded as Schema.org attachment, and their PDF URLs are included in the Crossref metadata.
Blog posts are published as web pages in HTML format and often authored in Markdown format. So why PDF? I have been struggling with PDF for a long time, as it is a horrible authoring format, made famous by Peter Murray-Rust:
PDF is a hamburger, and we're trying to turn it back into a cow.
At the same time PDF is an excellent archiving format. The reference manager Papers pioneered the idea of managing reference metadata together with PDF attachments, and other reference managers did something similar. This reference manager \u2013 PDF integration was further enhanced when more scholarly content became available as Open Access and reference manager Zotero added a Find Available PDF integration.
At the same time PDF/A became an official ISO standard for long-term preservation of PDF documents, making it an archiving option for digital repositories such as Rogue Scholar and complementing web-archiving standards such as WARC developed by the Internet Archive, which Rogue Scholar uses since October 2023.
PDF/A comes in several flavors and Rogue Scholar uses PDF/A-3A that allows attachments of files in any format, in this case the full-text HTML with embedded schema.org metadata. These metadata are embedded similar how this is done on web pages crawled by Google and others, but is added from the blog post metadata on PDF generation. This makes extraction of metadata and full-text HTML from PDF files much easier and faster and doesn't require machine learning tools such as GROBID. The latest versions of the commonmeta-py library can open these PDF files and extract the full-text and metadata, and for example convert to other formats.
The link to the PDF file is included in the metadata of every Rogue Scholar DOI, enabling downstream workflows to automatically fetch the PDF (all blog posts in Rogue Scholar are open access with a CC-BY license). One of the important use cases is of course reference managers, and the Zotero browser integration will now automatically not only fetch metadata from Rogue Scholar, but also the full-text PDF:
Another interesting use case of these archival PDF files is blog platform migration, e.g. from WordPress to Eleventy, or from Blogger to Quarto. While import scripts from other popular platforms exist, this generic archiving format should make it easier to migrate to any blogging platform. More work is of course needed to write import filters for specific platforms, but this is a big step forward.
Finally, the archival PDFs should make it easier to upload full-text content and metadata to other repository platforms, and the obvious starting point is other repositories also using the InvenioRDM platform.
Please reach out via Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments
Il y a deux ans environ, le projet Zotero a obtenu une bourse pour
Nous relayons ici
Nous vous l'annoncions il y a quelques mois: le nouveau bouton de\ncapture, qui venait d'\u00eatre\nmis en place sur Firefox, allait \u00eatre mis en place pour d'autres\nnavigateurs. C'est d\u00e9sormais chose faite pour Google Chrome\u00a0! (Les\nutilisateurs de Safari doivent encore patienter un peu.)
\n\u00c0 noter: Ce billet est une adaptation de l'
Petit rappel : jusque-l\u00e0, si l'extension Zotero pour Chrome d\u00e9tectait\nune r\u00e9f\u00e9rence sur une page web, il affichait une ic\u00f4ne dans la barre\nd'adresse. Pour les pages sur lesquelles l'extension ne pouvait pas\ntrouver de r\u00e9f\u00e9rences, on pouvait faire un clic droit sur la page et\nchoisir \u00abSave Page to Zotero\u00bb, pour ajouter un document Page\nWeb et une capture dans sa biblioth\u00e8que.
\nDepuis la derni\u00e8re version de l'extension Chrome, il est possible\nd'utiliser le m\u00eame bouton, qui figure en permanence dans la\nbarre d'outils, pour enregistrer un document depuis n'importe quelle\npage :
\nSi l'extension d\u00e9tecte une r\u00e9f\u00e9rence, le bouton affiche la m\u00eame ic\u00f4ne\nque par le pass\u00e9: un livre, un journal, un article de revue, un dossier,\netc. Sur toute autre page, vous verrez une ic\u00f4ne grise qui permettra\nl'enregistrement d'un document Page Web, avec une capture et les\ninformations les plus basiques la concernant (titre, URL, date de\nconsultation).
\nCe bouton unique et simplifi\u00e9 constitue l'avantage principal apport\u00e9\npar cette mise \u00e0 jour. Deux autres nouveaut\u00e9s font leur apparition.
\nD'une part, un menu d\u00e9roulant permet de choisir d'autres\nmani\u00e8res d'importer les r\u00e9f\u00e9rences. En g\u00e9n\u00e9ral, le clic sur le\nbouton reste la meilleure solution. Dans certains cas, le menu d\u00e9roulant\napporte quelques avantages, que vous pouvez d\u00e9couvrir dans le billet que\nnous avions consacr\u00e9 \u00e0 la version Firefox:
D'autre part, il est d\u00e9sormais possible d'enregistrer un PDF\ndans Zotero par un seul clic.
\nJusque-l\u00e0, l'enregistrement d'un PDF n\u00e9cessitait de le faire glisser\ndepuis la barre d'adresse pour le d\u00e9poser dans Zotero ou de\nl'enregistrer en local, puis de l'ajouter manuellement dans Zotero.\nD\u00e9sormais, lorsque vous affichez un fichier PDF dans Chrome, il vous\nsuffit de cliquer sur le nouveau bouton de capture dans la barre\nd'outils pour enregistrer le PDF dans Zotero.1\nIl est cependant import\u00e9 comme simple fichier PDF, sans \u00eatre attach\u00e9 \u00e0\nune r\u00e9f\u00e9rence bibliographique plus compl\u00e8te. Pour cr\u00e9er une telle\nr\u00e9f\u00e9rence, vous pouvez soit tenter de \u00abR\u00e9cup\u00e9rer les m\u00e9tadonn\u00e9es du\nPDF\u00bb, soit \u00abCr\u00e9er un document parent\u00bb \u00e0 remplir manuellement. Ces deux\noptions sont accessibles par un clic-droit sur le PDF. Dans une\nprochaine version, Zotero tentera de cr\u00e9er un \u00e9l\u00e9ment parent\nautomatiquement.
\nEn d\u00e9pit du nouveau bouton, certaines limitations\npersistent. Notons en deux. Premi\u00e8rement, tant que la page web\nn'a pas fini de charger dans Chrome, l'extension Zotero n'affiche que\nl'ic\u00f4ne grise de capture de page web, m\u00eame si la page contient une ou\nplusieurs r\u00e9f\u00e9rences bibliographiques. Deuxi\u00e8mement, la capture de page\nweb ne fonctionne pas si Zotero Standalone n'est pas ouvert. L\u00e0 aussi,\nune am\u00e9lioration est pr\u00e9vue et une future version permettra\nd'enregistrer des pages web directement dans votre compte zotero.org\nquand Standalone n'est pas ouvert (comme c'est d\u00e9j\u00e0 le cas pour les\nautres types de r\u00e9f\u00e9rences).
\nSi vous avez install\u00e9 la derni\u00e8re version de Chrome, votre extension\nZotero devrait \u00eatre mise \u00e0 jour automatiquement. Si vous n'utilisez pas\nactuellement Zotero avec Chrome, vous pouvez
1. \u00c0 condition toutefois que vous disposiez de\nla version 4.0.29 ou sup\u00e9rieure de Zotero Standalone.