arXiv subjects

Carlos Oscar S. Sorzano

Publications and source records attributed to Carlos Oscar S. Sorzano.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Quantifying the evolving topical structure of science across journals, countries, regions, and research domains

Timely and comparable indicators of the evolving structure of science are increasingly needed for research policy and strategic planning. We present a reproducible and scalable framework for quantifying the topical prevalence and recent dynamics of scientific activity using open scholarly metadata from OpenAlex. The approach combines a unified topic ontology with simple trend estimators derived from short time series, enabling consistent comparisons across journals, countries, regions, and domain-focused corpora. We illustrate the methodology through representative case studies spanning generalist journals, national output, metropolitan research ecosystems, and structural biology. Across these examples, the framework captures both system-level normalization effects and fine-grained specialization patterns. Because the pipeline is fully general and based on open data, it can be readily extended to continuous, multi-scale monitoring of the scientific landscape. The proposed methodology provides a compact and interpretable quantitative layer that can complement expert assessment in science policy, research evaluation, and strategic decision-making.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2026

Research Funding as a Decision Problem Under Heavy-Tailed Uncertainty

Heavy-tailed impact distributions, intrinsic uncertainty, and the high costs of proposal-based peer review increasingly challenge research funding decisions. Using large-scale bibliometric data, we show that past scientific performance provides statistically meaningful, though imperfect, information about future productivity and impact across multiple dimensions. An aggregated, percentile-normalised proxy signal captures this predictive structure robustly across research domains. We analyse deterministic and stochastic funding allocation mechanisms under impact-based objectives and find that both converge to highly concentrated allocations that favour a small number of top-performing researchers. To address the limitations of pure exploitation, we introduce a biased lottery framework based on a regularised decision-theoretic objective that explicitly balances exploration and exploitation while accounting for practical funding constraints. Our results suggest that biased lottery mechanisms offer a transparent, efficient, and scalable alternative to conventional peer review in environments characterised by heavy-tailed scientific returns. Additionally, we provide a web application, available at http://scilottery.biocomputingunit.es, that implements the deterministic allocation method presented in this work.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2024

Community recommendations on cryoEM data archiving and validation

In January 2020, a workshop was held at EMBL-EBI (Hinxton, UK) to discuss data requirements for deposition and validation of cryoEM structures, with a focus on single-particle analysis. The meeting was attended by 45 experts in data processing, model building and refinement, validation, and archiving of such structures. This report describes the workshop's motivation and history, the topics discussed, and consensus recommendations resulting from the workshop. Some challenges for future methods-development efforts in this area are also highlighted, as is the implementation to date of some of the recommendations.

q-bio.BM↗

arXiv2017

Challenges ahead Electron Microscopy for Structural Biology from the Image Processing point of view

Since the introduction of Direct Electron Detectors (DEDs), the resolution and range of macromolecules amenable to this technique has significantly widened, generating a broad interest that explains the well over a dozen reviews in top journal in the last two years. Similarly, the number of job offers to lead EM groups and/or coordinate EM facilities has exploded, and FEI (the main microscope manufacturer for Life Sciences) has received more than 100 orders of high-end electron microscopes by summer 2016. Strategic corporate movements are also happening, with very big players entering the market through key acquisitions (Thermo Fisher has recently bought FEI for \$4.2B), partly attracted by new Pharma interest in the field, now perceived to be in a position to impact structure-based drug design. The scientific perspectives are indeed extremely positive but, in these moments of well-founded generalized optimists, we want to make a reflection on some of the hurdles ahead us, since they certainly exist and they indeed limit the informational content of cryoEM projects. Here we focus on image processing aspects, particularly in the so-called area of Single Particle Analysis, discussing some of the current resolution and high-throughput limiting factors.

cs.CV↗