1,721,097 research outputs found
Traffic Injury Investigation
No full textCausal analysis in traffic crash–related injury and death investigation is a common application of epidemiologic concepts and data. In combination with medical, biomechanical, and crash reconstruction principles, forensic epidemiology (FE) methods are used to quantify the efficacy of vehicle safety devices such as seat belts and air bags. This application of FE is demonstrated with several case study examples in this chapter. Additional case studies illustrate how FE methods are used to evaluate the probability of causation of injuries observed following lower speed collisions. The final case study illustrates an analysis of the most probable cause of a death following two high speed collisions, occurring within seconds of each other. Other examples in the chapter are used to demonstrate fallacious pitfalls commonly observed in causal evaluations of crash-related injury
Criminal Investigation
No full textCausality is not often disputed in criminal prosecutions because the nature of the exposure (eg, gunshot, knife, blunt trauma) is strongly associated with the injury outcome (penetrating wound, skull fracture, etc.) such that causality is determined as a matter of common sense. In some cases that are prosecuted criminally, however, there are questions that require a reliable analysis of comparative risk in order to assess pivotal probabilistic issues pertaining to guilt or innocence. In this chapter a variety of examples of how forensic epidemiology methods are used in both the prosecution and defense of criminal matters are presented, illustrating the flexibility and duplicability of the methods
Medical Negligence Investigation
No full textMedical negligence legal actions require evidence of a causal association between the alleged act of negligence and the injury outcome that is deemed “more probable than not (>50% probable).” Very often the alternative explanation for the adverse outcome, aside from the alleged act of negligence, is the natural course of the disease process for which the treatment was sought. Ultimately, most causal disputes in medical negligence cases can be distilled to the quantification and comparison of competing risks. In this chapter the methods for estimating a comparative risk ratio in a medical negligence action are presented and illustrated with four case examples of the forensic epidemiologic investigation of serious injury following an alleged act of negligence
Product Defect/Liability Investigation
No full textHuman interaction with consumer products is a common source of injury in society, regardless of whether or not the product is dangerously defective. The investigation of the cause of injuries resulting from exposure to an allegedly defective product requires quantification of the proportion of injuries that resulted from the defect versus the injuries expected if the defect was not present (referred to as the attributable proportion under the exposed). In this chapter, two disparate case studies are presented in which infant deaths were associated with household products; one designed to be used with infants (an infant sleep positioner) and one not (corded window blinds). A comparative risk ratio was estimated for the investigated associations, with a resulting probability of causation
Survival Analysis
No full textIn this chapter, various techniques of assessing an individual's survival are presented, suitable for presentation in a forensic setting. The three techniques that are compared are the life table, Kaplan–Meier, and Weibull methods. Methods for assessing the uncertainty of a survival projection, as well as the bounds of what is “more probable than not” for an individual, suitable for presentation in a forensic setting, are discussed and presented as well
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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