Högskolan i Skövde

We report a meta-study of computer science literature published in 2024, focusing on how the concept of Uncertainty is defined and referenced across the field. While Uncertainty is a highly technical term with deep theoretical foundations, its recent rise in prominence—driven in part by the surge of interest in Artificial Intelligence—has not always been matched by a corresponding depth of treatment. To assess how the term is currently used, we conducted a systematic literature review of papers discussing Uncertainty across the broader field of Computer Science. For each relevant paper, we analysed whether a definition was provided, whether it was technical or non-technical, and whether it was properly referenced. Our findings confirm two hypotheses: (a) a substantial proportion of papers use the term ”uncertainty” without offering a technical definition, and (b) many technical definitions are not properly referenced, even when they are not novel. Specifically, 74% of the papers include non-referenced technical definitions. We also conducted a focused sub-analysis of papers that mention large language models (LLMs) in the same sentence as ”uncertainty”. In this subset, we observed an even higher proportion of papers lacking definitions altogether, and similarly high rates of non-referenced technical definitions. We present our methodology and findings in detail and discuss their implications, particularly the risks of conceptual ambiguity in a field increasingly reliant on shared but often unstated assumptions.