Hendrik Erz, PhD
I'm a postdoctoral researcher at
GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
and Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS).
I am a member of the project SynDIKAT, a project funded by the German
Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space, where I work as an expert in
Social Science Research Methods, Natural Language Processing and Computational Text Analysis
methods with a focus on social media disinformation and misinformation.
Political Sociology • Computational Social Science • Analytical Sociology • Computational Text Analysis/NLP • Legislative Debates • Policymaking • Science of Science • Ethics of AI
On October 20, 2025, I successfully defended my dissertation thesis at Linköping University. You can read more in the university's official press release.
Academic Research
I am currently affiliated with GESIS and CAIS. My research interests range from political and economic sociology to text analysis and computational social science. Find out at which conferences I'll be this year, and see my blog for bits and pieces on everything academic.
Conferences 2026
Tap to view detailsMost Recent Article: Gary King is Wrong About Peer-Review – But Not the Way You Think
Published October 27th, 2026
Abstract: The next LLM-generated scandal is upon us: Gary King just shared a manuscript that essentially argues that we could just let LLMs do all the peer-reviewing for us, because they outcompeted humans in almost 100% of all cases. The paper is decent in terms of ethics, flawed in its methodology, but it raises a fundamental question about what science is even about. In short, Gary King may be wrong about peer-review, but not like you think right now.
Open Source development
In my spare time, I advocate for Open Source. Since at least 2006 I have been a user, supporter, and contributor to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).
My main project is Zettlr. It is a "one-stop publication workbench" targeted at students and researchers in the arts and humanities. I started working on it in 2017 and have been the project lead ever since.
After the Twitter-exodus began, I started the go-to list for finding your peers, Academics on Mastodon. It lists hundreds of people from dozens of fields and Mastodon instances so that you can orient yourself in this new social media.
You can find more info on my involvement with software on my GitHub profile.