Book Review: “Users’ Guide to the Medical Literature - a Manual for Evidence Based Clinical Practice” “Users‘ Guide to the Medical Literature - A Manual for Evidence Based Clinical Practice”. Edited by GuyattGordon and RennieDrummond, 2002, AMA Press, Chicago, 706 pages, ISBN 1-57947-174-9 Recommended retail price: $170.00.AUD
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This book is the result of what began more than a decade ago as a series of articles that were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The series ran from 1993 to 2000. The forebears of this series were a similar but small series of articles published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, beginning in 1981. But as well as a genealogy, this book has a pedigree. The father of evidence based medicine; David Sackett worked closely with at least some of the editors and contributors to this volume, and has clearly provided inspiration to the many fine contributors. His intellectual fingerprints are all over these pages – and a good thing too.
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 | 0.007 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.118 | 0.184 |
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".