how to interpret scientific articles

This article explores missionary medical discourses in three Telugu journals published in the early twentieth century, to analyse how caste pivoted denunciations of alcohol, especially toddy and arrack, in the Madras Presidency and the Hyderabad state. It argues that one women's missionary journal, Vivekavathi , deployed medical knowledge to formulate subtle and occasionally explicit condemnations of toddy and arrack as unclean and unhealthy substances. The journal relied on universal medical and missionary, British and American knowledge frameworks to mark out Dalits and other marginalised castes as consumers of these local beverages...

International Dispute Settlement Bodies (IDSBs), through their judgements, have consistently urged the States to take scientific approaches in ocean governance for marine environmental protection. There has been the development of significant jurisprudence which undertake policy principles with scientific prescription in ocean governance. The jurisprudence relating to maritime dispute resolution has primarily relied on the interpretative criteria of 'integration' for science and policy as specified in the Vienna Convention...

IMPORTANCE: Despite mounting evidence for the management of various health care conditions, the uptake of scientific evidence in occupational therapy is often suboptimal. Although positive attitudes and self-efficacy are key to evidence-based practices (EBPs), how one becomes an evidence-based practitioner, and how expertise in EBP manifests in practice, remains unclear. OBJECTIVE: To describe how expert evidence-based practitioners conceptualize and enact their expertise in stroke rehabilitation...

This article analyses how the French Academy of Sciences assessed Jaime Ferrán's cholera vaccine submitted for the Prix Bréant in the 1880s. Ferrán, a Spanish independent physician, discovered the treatment in 1884 and tried it on thousands of patients during the cholera outbreak in Valencia the following year. His evaluation sparked a controversy in Spain and abroad on the vaccine's efficacy. The Bréant jury did not see any evidence for it in Ferrán's submission, a decision usually interpreted in terms of French scientific nationalism (or simple chauvinism): an outsider from the scientific periphery could not be awarded the Bréant...

OBJECTIVES: Describe the frequency and types of outcomes in randomized clinical trials (RCT) of intervention for distal radius fractures, analyze how confusing outcome presentations can lead to misinterpretations, and suggest strategies to improve the reader's understanding of the decision-making process. METHODS: A retrospective study was conducted through a systematized search on the PubMed® database in the last 10 years, in which only intervention RCT was included for distal radius fractures, and outcomes were analyzed...

Clinical trials have been the center of progress in modern medicine. In oncology, we are fortunate to have a structure in place through the National Clinical Trials Network (NCTN). The NCTN provides the infrastructure and a forum for scientific discussion to develop clinical concepts for trial design. The NCTN also provides a network group structure to administer trials for successful trial management and outcome analyses. There are many important aspects to trial design and conduct. Modern trials need to ensure appropriate trial conduct and secure data management processes...

What is the role of the ethnographer during a time of increased racial hostility, political mobilization to keep racial minorities "in their place," and commitments to revisionist interpretations of the country's past and projected future? While the traditional, classic ethnographic approach would recommend that the researcher should avoid taking a stance on so-called political matters and merely observe them, I argue that that position is insufficient to address the issues that people are currently facing...

PURPOSE: Taichi Chuan was previously shown to benefit physical health, but the results were inconsistent. The main reason is that the mechanism is not clear and may be interpreted differently. In this systematic review, we analyzed the data obtained from various randomized controlled trials to identify the effectiveness of Taichi Chuan and the mechanism by which it improves the physical health of adults. METHODS: We systematically searched various databases, including PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, Embase, EBSCO Host, Science Direct, CNKI, Wan-Fang, and VPCS, and obtained 1448 articles for review...

This article explores how psychological categories linked to the mental level, such as genius, mediocrity, and intellectual superiority, were directly intertwined with political discourse in the early 20th century. To illustrate this, I analyze El Hombre Mediocre (The Mediocre Man) published in 1913 by José Ingenieros, seemingly as a direct critique of the law for free democratic elections in Argentina sanctioned in 1912. The book's main argument drew on psychological categories to explain that democracy was, in fact, a poor choice in government...

BACKGROUND: As one of the few modifiable risk factors, the importance of dietary patterns for both disease prevention and treatment outcome in pediatric oncology has gained increasing popularity. Malnutrition is associated with lower survival rates, tolerance to treatment, and quality of life. Yet, especially in children with malignancies, nutritional deterioration is common, and pediatric cancer patients often present with inadequate intake of micro- and macronutrients alike. Despite the reported widespread use of dietary supplements, few empirical data provide a basis for clinical recommendations, and evidence for their efficacy is inconsistent...

BACKGROUND: Models are central to the acquisition and organisation of scientific knowledge. They can be viewed as tools for interpretive description as well as cognitive representations of an empirical phenomenon. However, discussions about how to develop models in qualitative research - particularly in the literature on thematic analysis - are sparse. AIM: To discuss an approach to scientific qualitative modelling that uses the new technique described in the first part of this article ( Gildberg and Wilson 2023 ): the Empirical Test for Thematic Analysis (ETTA)...

Consumer awareness of meat-associated health and environmental risks is increasing and motivates a shift toward consuming meat alternatives. This is also reflected in efforts invested in studying meat alternatives from the perspective of nutritional, environmental, and consumer sciences. Despite shared research interest, these studies cannot be readily compared and interpreted because there is no clear consensus on what meat alternatives are. Scholarly debates on acceptance, nutritional value, and environmental advantages of meat alternatives would benefit from a clear definition of meat alternatives...

Responsible citizenship and sound decision-making in today's information age necessitate an appreciation of the role of uncertainty in the process of generating data-based scientific knowledge. The latter calls for coordinating between different types of uncertainties, related to three types of relevant reasoning: statistical, scientific, and nature of science uncertainties. This article examines separately the uncertainties that young students articulate as they engage in activities designed to concurrently foster all three types of reasoning, and also explores how these different types can interrelate...

With the rapidly increasing amount of scientific literature, it is getting continuously more difficult for researchers in different disciplines to keep up-to-date with the recent findings in their field of study. Processing scientific articles in an automated fashion has been proposed as a solution to this problem, but the accuracy of such processing remains very poor for extraction tasks beyond the most basic ones (like locating and identifying entities and simple classification based on predefined categories)...

STUDY QUESTION: How should recurrent implantation failure (RIF) in patients undergoing ART be defined and managed? SUMMARY ANSWER: This is the first ESHRE good practice recommendations paper providing a definition for RIF together with recommendations on how to investigate causes and contributing factors, and how to improve the chances of a pregnancy. WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY: RIF is a challenge in the ART clinic, with a multitude of investigations and interventions offered and applied in clinical practice, often without biological rationale or with unequivocal evidence of benefit...

Since the practice turn, the role technologies play in the production of scientific knowledge has become a prominent topic in science studies. Much existing scholarship, however, either limits technology to merely mechanical instrumentation or uses the term for a wide variety of items. This article argues that technologies in scientific practice can be understood as a result of past scientific knowledge becoming sedimented in materials, like model organisms, synthetic reagents or mechanical instruments, through the routine use of these materials in subsequent research practice...

"Medicine is an art of benevolence [Kr. 인술 Insul, Ch. Renshu]." This slogan is widely accepted in East Asia, and at least in South Korea, it is generally regarded as an innate medical ethic. However, the original meaning of 'In' (Ch. Ren), which means 'benevolence,' 'humanity,' or simply 'love for one another,' is a Confucian virtue emphasized by Mencius. It is unclear when this Confucian term became the representative medical ethic in South Korea. The term "medical ethic" was not coined until the 19th century in the West (Robert Baker and Laurence B...

The National Forensic Laboratory Information System (NFLIS) is a drug surveillance program of the US Drug Enforcement Administration that systematically collects data on drugs that are seized by law enforcement and submitted to and analyzed by the Nation's forensic laboratories (NFLIS-Drug). NFLIS-Drug data are increasingly used in predictive modeling and drug surveillance to examine drug availability patterns. Given the complexity of the data and data collection, there are some common methodological pitfalls that we highlight with the aim of helping researchers avoid these concerns...

Tetrazolium reduction and resazurin assays are the mainstay of routine in vitro toxicity batteries. However, potentially erroneous characterization of cytotoxicity and cell proliferation can arise if verification of baseline interaction of test article with method employed is neglected. The current investigation aimed to demonstrate how interpretation of results from several standard cytotoxicity and proliferation assays vary in dependence on contributions from the pentose phosphate pathway (PPP). Non-tumorigenic Beas-2B cells were treated with graded concentrations of benzo[a]pyrene (B[a]P) for 24 and 48 h prior to cytotoxicity and proliferation assessment with commonly used MTT, MTS, WST1, and Alamar Blue assays...

Forensic psychiatrists have called for greater attention to cultural and racial topics in assessing examinees. While suggestions for new methods are welcome, they can ignore the extent of scientific progress if existing assessments are not accurately appraised. This article analyzes the arguments of two recent publications in The Journal that mischaracterize the cultural formulation approach. Contrary to the idea that forensic psychiatrists have received little guidance on assessing an examinee's racial identity, the article shows that forensic psychiatrists have contributed to scholarship on assessing racial identifications through cultural formulations that elicit how minoritized ethnoracial examinees interpret their illness experiences and legal involvements...