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by craigdalton 164 days ago
The personas have to paper specific I believe, addressing the content and methods. I guess an LLM could do a once over of the paper or meta-analysis to determine the best discipline specific personas - but would be interesting to test that. But there are also the benefits of deep expertise and understanding a field for decades. For example, I know a set of authors who repeatedly find significant associations in a field in almost every study they do, whereas others have variable results. They also seem to ignore good studies that disagree with their hypotheses and use inferior studies that support their position in review papers - so I dont really trust their work. It would be great if an LLM could develop that kind of understanding and somehow deprecate a body of work that had inherent author or institutional biases - even though on the surface the review looks legitimate. For a meta-analysis it is often the papers that are omitted that are most telling. That means the LLM will need to redo the entire search and synthesis - yikes!
1 comments

You just articulated the 'Holy Grail' of automated appraisal. Detecting bias across a career is a massive graph problem compared to checking a single paper. It essentially requires auditing an entire bibliography before synthesis.

I am adding 'Author Reputation/Bias Analysis' to the long-term roadmap. Thanks for the rigorous stress-test today.

How will you do this, one author I don't trust (sent them an error they missed in their paper - didnt correct it, has systemic bias in their writing) was invited to write a review article by the New England Journal of Medicine - has an excellent reputation for all the world to see.
You found the ultimate edge case. The 'Prestige Proxy' (NEJM = Truth) essentially masks that individual's actual track record.

While we might be able to detect 'Insular Citation Clusters' mathematically to flag systemic bias, no model can catch a private signal like an ignored email. It reinforces why the human expert is indispensable. The tool is a force multiplier for judgment, not a substitute.