Making any type of decision, from buying a car to siting a nuclear plant, from choosing the best student deserving a scholarship to ranking the cities of the world according to their liveability, involves the evaluation of several alternatives with respect to different aspects, technically called evaluation criteria. Multiple Criteria Decision Aiding (MCDA) (see [13, 14]) provides methodologies...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and select consulting firms by suggesting a centroid ranking approach based fuzzy multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) method, where ratings of alternatives versus qualitative criteria and the different importance weights among criteria are assessed in linguistic values represented by fuzzy numbers. Criteria are categorized to qualitative, benefit qu...

background and objectives: the reliability of hospital assessment results depends on the appropriateness of the indicators used. in this study, we systematically review the literature to identify the major indicators of hospital performance evaluation, as employed in performance assessment literature.methods: literature databases including pubmed, scopus, science direct, google scholar, doja, a...

distribution of retinal blood vessels (rbvs) in retinal images has an important role in the prevention, diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of diseases, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, or heart disease. therefore, detection of the exact location of rbvs is very important for ophthalmologists. one of the frequently used techniques for extraction of these vessels is region growing-based se...

Although they complain that qualitative proposals are not reviewed fairly when funding agencies use quantitative criteria, qualitative researchers have failed the system by not developing alternative criteria for the evaluation of qualitative proposals. In this article, the author corrects this deficit by presenting criteria to assess the relevance, rigor, and feasibility of qualitative researc...

BACKGROUND Mixed methods or multimethod research holds potential for rigorous, methodologically sound investigations in primary care. The objective of this study was to use criteria from the literature to evaluate 5 mixed methods studies in primary care and to advance 3 models useful for designing such investigations. METHODS We first identified criteria from the social and behavioral science...

The present letter is to thank Drs Shaw, Larkin and Flowers for their enlightening article entitled ‘Expanding the evidence within evidence-based healthcare: thinking about the context, acceptability and feasibility of interventions’, and provide complementary information to your readership about synthesis designs and critical appraisal for systematic mixed studies reviews (ie, reviews that inc...

this study used quantifying factors affecting desertification based on the iranian model of desertification potentialassessment (imdpa) to assess the current status of desertification in bordekhun region, iran. bordekhun region has anarea of 214.11 km2 and is located near the city of daiyer in boushehr province. first, a working unit map of the regionwas selected as the basic map for evaluation...