Hello, I have previously conducted some research based on your past subject classifications. I just saw this post. I would like to ask how significant the issues with past classifications are and whether they can be applied to serious academic research. I have a large number of documents; can statistical methods be used to reduce the impact of errors in them?
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Hello. It’s hard to say whether the issues we observed would hinder your academic research as it is difficult to quantify the accuracy of our now-removed subject classifications. Given the first reason for why they were problematic noted in the above blog post, I would be wary of their utility:
They are misleadingly exposed in the API as a property of the work, when in fact they are a property of the container (e.g. a journal or conference proceeding). Just because a journal’s broad topic category is “X” doesn’t mean that a particular article in the journal is about “X.”
But again, without knowing more about how they were applied in your work, it’s hard to say.