Background: One aspect of undertaking a systematic literature review is to perform a quality evaluation of primary studies. Most quality checklists adopted from medicine, psychology and social studies assume that the experimental unit in an experiment is a human being. However, in empirical studies in software engineering the experimental unit may be a technology, an application or an algorithm...

There are many case studies for which the formulation of RDF constraints and the validation of RDF data conforming to these constraint is very important. As a part of the collaboration with the W3C and the DCMI working groups on RDF validation, we identified major RDF validation requirements and initiated an RDF validation requirements database which is available to contribute at http://purl.or...

OBJECTIVE To better understand the structure of the Patient Assessment of Chronic Illness Care (PACIC) instrument. More specifically to test all published validation models, using one single data set and appropriate statistical tools. DESIGN Validation study using data from cross-sectional survey. PARTICIPANTS A population-based sample of non-institutionalized adults with diabetes residing ...

BACKGROUND Successful recruitment and retention of participants into research studies is critical for optimising internal and external validity. Research into diet and lifestyle of young women is important due to the physiological transitions experienced at this life stage. This paper aims to evaluate data related to recruitment and retention across three research studies with young women, and ...

This paper discusses the underlying conceptual problems of techniques employed in hearing aid selection and evaluation processes in four classes: target gain formulae, consumers' jUdgement, speech intelligibility, and self-report. Although technology for delivering and assessing acoustic properties is now largely in place, all the prescriptive formulae suffer from the absence of systematic larg...

BACKGROUND Accurate assessment of self-reports of sexual behaviours is vital to the evaluation of HIV prevention and family planning interventions. This investigation was to determine the cross-cultural suitability of the Condom Use Self Efficacy Scale (CUSES) originally developed for American adolescents and young adults by examining the structure and psychometric properties. METHOD A self-a...

Critical to the discovery, development and rational use of drugs and vaccines are the foundational principles and proper application of statistics. However, in too many cases, there has been misuse of statistics and/or overemphasis on statistical significance (p < 0.05), as though this criterion possessed truth-guaranteeing properties. To clarify confusion about the proper use of statistics in ...

In this study, the interferometric coherence calculated from 12-day Sentinel-1 image pairs was analysed in relation to mowing events on agricultural grasslands. Results showed that after a mowing event, median VH (vertical transmit, horizontal receive) and VV (vertical transmit, vertical receive) polarisation coherence values were statistically significantly higher than those from before the ev...

OBJECTIVES Frozen shoulder is a disease in which shoulder becomes stiff. Accurate diagnosis of frozen shoulder is helpful in providing economical and effective treatment for patients. This research provides the classification of unstructured data using data mining techniques. Prediction results are validated by K-fold cross-validation method. It also provides accurate diagnosis of frozen should...

PURPOSE Several genes that are associated with protection from or susceptibility to trachomatous trichiasis (TT) have been identified through genetic association studies. Yet there have been few studies in which gene expression profiles were assessed in TT cases and disease-free controls. The purpose was to identify genes that are differentially expressed in the upper tarsal conjunctiva of subj...