The activities of organizing knowledge recorded in texts and obtaining knowledge from human experts – the knowledge acquisition process – are essential for scientific development. In this article, we propose methodological steps for knowledge acquisition, which have been applied to the construction of biomedical ontologies. The methodological steps are tested in a real case of knowledge acquisi...

BACKGROUND Smoking of tobacco is estimated to have caused approximately six million deaths worldwide in 2014. Responding effectively to this epidemic requires a thorough understanding of how smoking behaviour is transmitted and modified. METHODS We present a new mathematical model of the social dynamics that cause cigarette smoking to spread in a population, incorporating aspects of individua...

BACKGROUND Overviews of systematic reviews are an increasingly popular method of evidence synthesis; there is a lack of clear guidance for completing overviews and a number of methodological challenges. At the UK Cochrane Symposium 2016, methodological challenges of five overviews were explored. Using data from these five overviews, practical implications to support methodological decision maki...

Background: Confounding can be thought of as mixing the effect of exposure on the risk of disease with a third factor which distorts the measure of association such as risk ratio or odds ratio. This bias arises because of complex functional relationship of confounder with both exposure and disease (outcome). In this article, we provided a conceptual framework review of confounding issues in epi...

To date, asexuality has received little research attention and methodological issues for studying this population remain largely unaddressed. Studies have drawn on existing approaches and instruments and what asexuals themselves have learned in discoursing with each other has not always been consistently taken into account in research designs. I discuss operational definitions, sampling problem...

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