Public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instructions, searching data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. Send comments regarding this burden estimate or any other aspect of this collection of information, including suggestio...

A growing body of recent work has identified several problems with economic evaluations undertaken alongside controlled trials that can have potentially serious impacts on the ability of decision makers to draw valid conclusions. At the same time, the use of cost-effectiveness models has been drawn into question, due to the alleged arbitrary nature of their construction. This has led researcher...

Given a set of points drawn from an unknown continuous probability distribution, one often wishes to infer the underlying distribution. This distribution can be estimated using a simple scalar field theory. Fluctuations around the estimate are characterized by a robust measure of goodness of fit, analogous to the conventional x2, whose distribution can also be calculated. The resulting method o...

The primordial abundance of long-lived heavy Majorana neutrinos is calculated from the full Boltzmann equation. Inclusion of scattering reactions drastically change the predicted abundance of a heavy neutrino species. This loosens the well known mass constraint on MeV neutrinos from Big Bang nucleosynthesis, and allows for the existence of a Majorana τ neutrino with mass mντ ≥ 11 MeV. Further e...

Though attempts have been made to improve the peer review process, these have not resulted in any widespread change. In its most common form, peer review is no assurance of identifying even basic methodological errors or biases. There is a tendency to overly restrict participation in the critical discussion, with invited participants often unable to devote sufficient time to adequately assess a...

BACKGROUND Blinding is a measure in randomized controlled trials (RCT) to reduce detection and performance bias. There is evidence that lack of blinding leads to overestimated treatment effects. Because of the physical component of interventions, blinding is not easily applicable in surgical trials. This is a protocol for a systematic review and empirical study about actual impact on outcomes a...

Would the publication of anonymous referee reports and editorial decision letters of published papers benefit the scientific debate? Results from a trial seem to suggest this.

A series of experiments explored a form of object-specific priming. In all experiments a preview field containing two or more letters is followed by a target letter that is to be named. The displays are designed to produce a perceptual interpretation of the target as a new state of an object that previously contained one of the primes. The link is produced in different experiments by a shared l...

BACKGROUND The Cochrane Highly Sensitive Search Strategy (HSSS), which contains three phases, is widely used to identify Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) in MEDLINE. Lefebvre and Clarke suggest that reviewers might consider using four revisions of the HSSS. The objective of this study is to validate these four revisions: combining the free text terms volunteer, crossover, versus, and the Med...

Citation Aaij, R., B. Adeva, M. Adinolfi, A. Affolder, Z. Ajaltouni, S. Akar, J. Albrecht, et al. “Search for Hidden-Sector Bosons in B[superscript 0] K[superscript *0][superscript +][superscript ] Decays.” Physical Review Letters 115, no. 16 (October 16, 2015). © 2015 CERN, for the LHCb Collaboration As Published http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.161802 Publisher American Physical Society