Jevin West
Bio
Jevin West is a Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington. He is the co-founder and the inaugural director of the Center for an Informed Public at UW, aimed at resisting strategic misinformation, promoting an informed society and strengthening democratic discourse. He is also the co-founder of the DataLab at UW, a Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute, and Affiliate Faculty for the Center for Statistics & Social Sciences. His research and teaching focus on the impact of data and technology on science, with a focus on slowing the spread of misinformation. He is the co-author of the book, “Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World,” which helps non-experts question numbers, data, and statistics without an advanced degree in data science.
Preprints
RED-CT: A Systems Design Methodology for Using LLM-labeled Data to Train and Deploy Edge Classifiers for Computational Social Science
David Farr, Nico Manzonelli, Iain Cruickshank, Jevin West
Large language models (LLMs) have enhanced our ability to rapidly analyze and classify unstructured natural language data. However, concerns regarding cost,…
Suspensions of prominent accounts minimally impact platform engagement
Kayla Duskin, Joseph Bak-Coleman, Jevin West
Health-related misinformation online poses threats to individual well-being and undermines public health efforts. In response, many social media platforms have…
Revisiting the replication crisis without false positives
Carl T. Bergstrom, Kevin Gross, Richard P. Mann, Joseph Bak-Coleman, Jevin West
Efforts to replicate portions of the scientific literature have lead to widely varying and often low rates of replicability. This has raised concerns over a `…
Disagreement as a way to study misinformation and its effects
Damian Hodel, Jevin West
Misinformation - false or misleading information - is considered a significant societal concern due to its associated "misinformation effects," such as…
Men Set Their Own Cites High: Gender and Self-citation across Fields and over Time
Carl T. Bergstrom, Molly M. King, Jennifer Jacquet, Shelley Correll, Jevin West
How common is self-citation in scholarly publication, and does the practice vary by gender? Using novel methods and a data set of 1.5 million research papers…
Why scatter plots suggest causality, and what we can do about it
Carl T. Bergstrom, Jevin D. West
Scatter plots carry an implicit if subtle message about causality. Whether we look at functions of one variable in pure mathematics, plots of experimental…
Combining interventions to reduce the spread of viral misinformation
Joseph Scott Schafer, Emma Spiro, Andrew Beers, Kate Starbird, Ian Kennedy, Joseph Bak-Coleman, Morgan Wack, Jevin West
Misinformation online poses a range of threats, from subverting democratic processes to undermining public health measures. Proposed solutions range from…
Big Macs and Eigenfactor Scores: Don't Let Correlation Coefficients Fool You
Jevin West, Theodore Bergstrom, Carl Bergstrom
The Eigenfactor Metrics provide an alternative way of evaluating scholarly journals based on an iterative ranking procedure analogous to Google's PageRank…
How should the advent of large language models affect the practice of science?
Zeynep Akata, Daniel J. Schad, Stephan Alaniz, Samuel J. Gershman, Dirk U. Wulff, Rich Shiffrin, Vencislav Popov, Marcel Binz, Marco Marelli, Qiong Zhang, Eric Schulz, Adina Roskies, Carl Bergstrom, Matthew M. Botvinick, Emily M. Bender, Colin Allen, Jevin West, Balazs Aczel
Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly incorporated into scientific workflows. However, we have yet to fully grasp the implications of this…
