Bibliographic record
Abstract
This textbook provides good reference information for veterinary practitioners and detail oriented shepherds. It has been expanded and updated from previous editions. The book is divided into 16 parts, containing a total of 75 chapters. The text has more information on diseases other than just those of sheep. The first part is about sheep in general, with country distribution statistics and use of sheep in Europe. Part 2 consists of chapters on the welfare of sheep, including standards and practices. Part 3, one of the most comprehensive and up-to-date parts, is titled “Reproductive Physiology” and contains chapters on reproductive and perinatal management. Most parts of the book are based on the systems approach to diseases. All body systems are covered, followed by information on poisons, tumors, and diseases. Finally, there is a part that compiles some useful information on flock management, therapeutics, anaesthesia, and postmortem diagnosis. The appendices include hematology and biochemistry reference tables for sheep, which are always good for clinicians to have close at hand. High quality color and black and white figures are included; all have informative legends and are helpful in understanding the concepts. The editor and contributors from the Moredun Research Institute are renowned for their expertise in sheep and animal health research. The list of invited contributors is extensive and they provide many perspectives. There is some inconsistency in the content of the disease sections, which may be due to having so many contributors and a flexible format. For example, most chapters on disease include a description of cause, clinical signs, epidemiology, treatment, and pathology. The therapeutic information ranges from very general to very detailed with specific dosages and holding times in only some of the chapters. In most pathology sections there is only a description of necropsy findings and occasionally in some chapters there is a detailed discussion of the pathogenesis of the diseases. As indicated in the 1st chapter, the book is truly based on the “UK perspective of the World.” There are only 2 contributing authors from North America, one of whom has been in Canada only a few years, and had developed his disease expertise in the UK. There is a short chapter on regional differences of sheep diseases within North America and minimal reference to epidemiological differences that exist around the world. For example, Q fever, which is emerging as a highly significant cause of reproductive disease in sheep in some countries and is a very significant concern for the international sheep trade, is inadequately described. In summary, this is not a textbook that provides extensive detail on diseases of sheep, although it is generally comprehensive. The additional chapters, which are not specifically about diseases, are informative but are somewhat out of place for the student of veterinary medicine or practitioner looking for an indepth reference for diseases of sheep. The quality of the publication is high and so is the price. The number of textbooks that address problems of sheep are few, and this one ranks among the best in my experience.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.069 | 0.065 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".