Single‐subject research design: recommendations for levels of evidence and quality rating
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this article is to present a set of evidence levels, accompanied by 14 quality or rigor questions, to foster a critical review of published single-subject research articles. In developing these guidelines, we reviewed levels of evidence and quality/rigor criteria that are in wide use for group research designs, e.g. randomized controlled trials, such as those developed by the Treatment Outcomes Committee of the American Academy for Cerebral Palsy and Developmental Medicine. We also reviewed methodological articles on how to conduct and critically evaluate single-subject research designs (SSRDs). We then subjected the quality questions to interrater agreement testing and refined them until acceptable agreement was reached. We recommend that these guidelines be implemented by clinical researchers who plan to conduct single-subject research or who incorporate SSRD studies into systematic reviews, and by clinicians who aim to practise evidence-based medicine and who wish to critically review pediatric single-subject research.
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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 | 0.719 | 0.830 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.017 | 0.032 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.027 | 0.028 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.019 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.021 | 0.024 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.007 |
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; the direct Gemma label and the distilled Codex classifier agree on what is shown here.
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".