Bibliographic record
Abstract
Florence Nightingale and the early origins of evidence-based nursingFlorence Nightingale is now a much ignored historical figure.The publication of the Collected Works of Florence Nightingale by Wilfred Laurier University Press, beginning in 2001, will outline her enormous contribution not only to the foundation of the nursing profession but also to the establishment of a public healthcare system.The Collected Works will include her published works and many unpublished letters and notes.Not the least of the areas where quite a new Nightingale will appear is in evidence-based nursing, a term that was not in use in her day, but a concept central to her own theory of nursing and health care. A passionate statisticianLet's begin by looking at Nightingale as a systemic thinker and a "passionate statistician."Her work in nursing and social reform was informed by a religious faith or philosophy that favoured a systemic approach: God made the world and runs it by laws, which we can discover by research in both the biophysical and social spheres.For Nightingale, this entailed the best possible research, access to the best available government statistics and expertise, and the collection of new material where the existing stock was inadequate.Nightingale's leadership style was very much knowledge based.She herself was a pioneer developer of survey instruments, always vetted by other experts and pretested on appropriate cases.She was also a pioneer in the graphical presentation of data.At a time when research reports were only beginning to include tables, Nightingale was using bar and pie charts, which were colour coded to highlight key points (eg, high mortality rates under certain conditions).Nightingale was keen not only to get the science right but also to make it comprehensible to lay people, especially the politicians and senior civil servants who made and administered the laws. Evidence-based practiceSeveral examples clearly reflect an evidence-based framework, ranging from Nightingale's first work after her return as a heroine from the Crimean War in 1856, to a late attempt to influence social policy with a proposal for a chair in "social physics" at Oxford University in 1891.These examples will be described briefly.
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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 | 0.015 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.021 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
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".