Caveat emptor, computational social science: Large-scale missing data in a widely-published Reddit corpus

As researchers use computational methods to study complex social behaviors at scale, the validity of this computational social science depends on the integrity of the data. On July 2, 2015, Jason Baumgartner published a dataset advertised to include ``every publicly available Reddit comment'' which was quickly shared on Bittorrent and the Internet Archive. This data quickly became the basis of many academic papers on topics including machine learning, social behavior, politics, breaking news, and hate speech. We have discovered substantial gaps and limitations in this dataset which may contribute to bias in the findings of that research. In this paper, we document the dataset, substantial missing observations in the dataset, and the risks to research validity from those gaps. In summary, we identify strong risks to research that considers user histories or network analysis, moderate risks to research that compares counts of participation, and lesser risk to machine learning research that avoids making representative claims about behavior and participation on Reddit.

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PID https://www.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0200162
PID arXiv:1803.05046
PID pmc:PMC6034852
PID pmid:29979741
URL https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0200162&type=printable
URL http://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018PLoSO..1300162G/abstract
URL https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.05046.pdf
URL http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC6034852
URL http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0200162
URL http://arxiv.org/abs/1803.05046
URL https://export.arxiv.org/pdf/1803.05046
URL https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.05046
URL http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0200162
URL https://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/journals/corr/corr1803.html#abs-1803-05046
URL https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0200162
URL http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC6034852?pdf=render
URL http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0200162
URL https://academic.microsoft.com/#/detail/2793601628
URL https://doaj.org/toc/1932-6203
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Access Right Open Access
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Author Devin Gaffney, 0000-0002-9540-5814
Author J. Nathan Matias
Contributor Danforth, Christopher M.
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Collected From Europe PubMed Central; PubMed Central; Datacite; figshare; UnpayWall; arXiv.org e-Print Archive; DOAJ-Articles; Crossref; Microsoft Academic Graph
Hosted By Europe PubMed Central; PLoS ONE; figshare; arXiv.org e-Print Archive
Publication Date 2018-07-06
Publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS)
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Language UNKNOWN
Resource Type Other literature type; Preprint; Article; UNKNOWN
keyword Q
keyword R
keyword keywords.General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
system:type publication
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Source https://science-innovation-policy.openaire.eu/search/publication?articleId=dedup_wf_001::bb7415543dff6a204d414f8ae24f1887
Author jsonws_user
Last Updated 23 December 2020, 03:10 (CET)
Created 23 December 2020, 03:10 (CET)