Data within a continuing use context (also known as secondary use) can require translation into the variables necessary for project analysis. We have developed and applied a framework in which: Project objectives inform the curation of data elements. Data elements are rendered into system-readable metadata. Metadata are applied to the source data and used to produce data sets. This process dist...

INTRODUCTION Responsible conduct of research implies that results of clinical trials should be completely and adequately reported. This article describes the design of a cohort study that aims to investigate the occurrence and the determinants of selective reporting in an inception cohort of all clinical drug trials that were reviewed by the Dutch Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) in 2007. It ...

Aims and Objectives: In 1995, students in the UK identified five characteristics of a good mentor. After 14 years, the author repeated the study to investigate whether students still identify the same characteristics of a good mentor. Design: Cross-sectional descriptive study. Methods: The study was conducted in the UK, USA and Jordan to validate the previous study in countries with different c...

Classifier induction is a specific data-mining task that is part of the knowledge discovery process. Its objectives are to extract accurate, comprehensible and interesting knowledge. However, most classifier induction approaches focus only on one of these objectives. This paper introduces a Multi-Objective Evolutionary Rule Base Induction System (MERBIS) that is capable of optimising both, accu...

This paper adopts a modified approach of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to measure the academic efficiency of university departments. In real-world case studies, conventional DEA models often identify too many decision-making units (DMUs) as efficient. This occurs when the number of DMUs under evaluation is not large enough compared to the total number of decision variables. To overcome this l...