ChiaraBoldrini MarcoConti AndreaPassarella Modelling data dissemination in opportunistic networks 2008 ChiaraBoldrini MarcoConti AndreaPassarella ContentPlace: Social-aware Data Dissemination in Opportunistic Networks 2008 S.Golder Y.Loke H.M.McIntosh Room for improvement? A survey of the methods used in systematic reviews of adverse effects BMC medical research methodology 6 3 2006 BACKGROUND: Although the methods for conducting systematic reviews of efficacy are well established, there is much less guidance on how systematic reviews of adverse effects should be performed. METHODS: In order to determine where methodological research is most needed to improve systematic reviews of adverse effects of health care interventions, we conducted a descriptive analysis of systematic reviews published between 1994 and 2005. We searched the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE) and The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR) to identify systematic reviews in which the primary outcome was an adverse effect or effects. We then extracted data on many of the elements of the systematic review process including: types of interventions studied, adverse effects of interest, resources searched, search strategies, data sources included in reviews, quality assessment of primary data, nature of the data analysis, and source of funding. RESULTS: 256 reviews were included in our analysis, of which the majority evaluated drug interventions and pre-specified the adverse effect or effects of interest. A median of 3 resources were searched for each review and very few reviews (13/256) provided sufficient information to reproduce their search strategies. Although more than three quarters (185/243) of the reviews sought to include data from sources other than randomised controlled trials, fewer than half (106/256) assessed the quality of the studies that were included. Data were pooled quantitatively in most of the reviews (165/256) but heterogeneity was not always considered. Less than half (123/256) of the reviews reported on the source of funding. CONCLUSION: There is an obvious need to improve the methodology and reporting of systematic reviews of adverse effects. The methodology around identification and quality assessment of primary data is the main concern. S.Golder H.M.McIntosh Y.Loke Identifying systematic reviews of the adverse effects of health care interventions BMC medical research methodology 6 22 2006 BACKGROUND: In order to carry out a methodological research survey of systematic reviews of adverse effects we needed to retrieve a sample of systematic reviews in which the primary outcome is an adverse effect or effects. METHODS: We carried out searches of the Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE) and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR) for systematic reviews of adverse effects published between 1994 to 2005. The search strategies used a combination of text words in the title and abstract, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and subheadings/qualifiers. In addition, DARE records in progress were hand searched. No language restrictions were placed on any of the searches. The performance, in terms of sensitivity and precision, of the search strategies and their combinations were tested in DARE and CDSR. RESULTS: In total 3635 records were screened of which 257 met our inclusion criteria. The precision of the searches in CDSR was low (0% to 3%), and no one search strategy could retrieve all the relevant records in either DARE or CDSR. Hand searching the records from DARE and CDSR not retrieved by our searches indicated that we had missed relevant systematic reviews in both DARE and CDSR. The sensitivities of many of the search combinations were comparable to those found when searching for primary studies in which adverse effects are secondary outcomes. CONCLUSION: Searching major databases of systematic reviews, for systematic reviews of adverse effects, proved more difficult than anticipated due to a lack of standard terminology used by the authors, inadequate indexing and the variations in the search interfaces of the databases. At present hand searching all records in DARE and CDSR seems to be the only way to ensure retrieval of all systematic reviews of adverse effects in these databases. T.Greenhalgh R.Peacock Effectiveness and efficiency of search methods in systematic reviews of complex evidence: audit of primary sources BMJ (Clinical research ed.) 331 1064-1065 2005 OBJECTIVE: To describe where papers come from in a systematic review of complex evidence. Method Audit of how the 495 primary sources for the review were originally identified. RESULTS: Only 30% of sources were obtained from the protocol defined at the outset of the study (that is, from the database and hand searches). Fifty one per cent were identified by "snowballing" (such as pursuing references of references), and 24% by personal knowledge or personal contacts. CONCLUSION: Systematic reviews of complex evidence cannot rely solely on protocol-driven search strategies. K.A.McKibbon N.L.Wilczynski R.B.Haynes What do evidence-based secondary journals tell us about the publication of clinically important articles in primary healthcare journals? BMC medicine 2 33 2004 BACKGROUND: We conducted this analysis to determine i) which journals publish high-quality, clinically relevant studies in internal medicine, general/family practice, general practice nursing, and mental health; and ii) the proportion of clinically relevant articles in each journal. METHODS: We performed an analytic survey of a hand search of 170 general medicine, general healthcare, and specialty journals for 2000. Research staff assessed individual articles by using explicit criteria for scientific merit for healthcare application. Practitioners assessed the clinical importance of these articles. Outcome measures were the number of high-quality, clinically relevant studies published in the 170 journal titles and how many of these were published in each of four discipline-specific, secondary "evidence-based" journals (ACP Journal Club for internal medicine and its subspecialties; Evidence-Based Medicine for general/family practice; Evidence-Based Nursing for general practice nursing; and Evidence-Based Mental Health for all aspects of mental health). Original studies and review articles were classified for purpose: therapy and prevention, screening and diagnosis, prognosis, etiology and harm, economics and cost, clinical prediction guides, and qualitative studies. RESULTS: We evaluated 60,352 articles from 170 journal titles. The pass criteria of high-quality methods and clinically relevant material were met by 3059 original articles and 1073 review articles. For ACP Journal Club (internal medicine), four titles supplied 56.5% of the articles and 27 titles supplied the other 43.5%. For Evidence-Based Medicine (general/family practice), five titles supplied 50.7% of the articles and 40 titles supplied the remaining 49.3%. For Evidence-Based Nursing (general practice nursing), seven titles supplied 51.0% of the articles and 34 additional titles supplied 49.0%. For Evidence-Based Mental Health (mental health), nine titles supplied 53.2% of the articles and 34 additional titles supplied 46.8%. For the disciplines of internal medicine, general/family practice, and mental health (but not general practice nursing), the number of clinically important articles was correlated withScience Citation Index (SCI) Impact Factors. CONCLUSIONS: Although many clinical journals publish high-quality, clinically relevant and important original studies and systematic reviews, the articles for each discipline studied were concentrated in a small subset of journals. This subset varied according to healthcare discipline; however, many of the important articles for all disciplines in this study were published in broad-based healthcare journals rather than subspecialty or discipline-specific journals. TedRalphs Vehicle Routing Data Sets 2003 SandraRapps ElaineJ.Weyuker Data flow analysis techniques for test data selection IEEE Computer Society Press 272–278 1982 This paper examines a family of program test data selection criteria derived from data flow analysis techniques similar to those used in compiler optimization. It is argued that currently used path selection criteria which examine only the control flow of a program are inadequate. Our procedure associates with each point in a program at which a variable is defined, those points at which the value is used. Several related path criteria, which differ in the number of these associations needed to adequately test the program, are defined and compared. DanielJ.Solove Data Mining and the Security-Liberty Debate University of Chicago Law Review 74 2008 In this essay, written for a symposium on surveillance for the University of Chicago Law Review, I examine some common difficulties in the way that liberty is balanced against security in the context of data mining. Countless discussions about the trade-offs between security and liberty begin by taking a security proposal and then weighing it against what it would cost our civil liberties. Often, the liberty interests are cast as individual rights and balanced against the security interests, which are cast in terms of the safety of society as a whole. Courts and commentators defer to the government's assertions about the effectiveness of the security interest. In the context of data mining, the liberty interest is limited by narrow understandings of privacy that neglect to account for many privacy problems. As a result, the balancing concludes with a victory in favor of the security interest. But as I argue, important dimensions of data mining's security benefits require more scrutiny, and the privacy concerns are significantly greater than currently acknowledged. These problems have undermined the balancing process and skewed the results toward the security side of the scale. EXPLOITING SEMANTIC WEB TECHNOLOGIES FOR HARMONIZING E-MARKETS information Technolgies and Tourism 7 201-217 2005 A main obstacle to e-commerce is the well-known “interoperability problem.” Different players have different views of the world, even in the same application field. This is particularly true in the travel and tourism e-market where IT has been applied for a long time, leading to a plethora of different information systems, each with its own data model and structure. In this article we describe the approach followed in “HARMO-TEN,” a European project aimed at solve the data heterogeneity problem by setting up a “virtual interoperable network” and providing the partici- pants with a technological infrastructure based on a shared ontology. This will allow exchanging information in a seamless way while keeping existing data models unchanged.