Sex-selective abortion: a systematic map of the volume and nature of research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background - This report takes the form of a systematic map examining the volume and nature of research concerning sex-selective abortion. The map is not intended to supply an answer to the question "What is the extent of sex-selective abortion in England, Wales and -Scotland?" Rather, the purpose of the map is to describe the volume and key characteristics of research concerning sex-selective abortion; i.e. to identify and describe what research has been carried out in this area. \nMethodology Empirical, quantitative, English language research focussed upon sex-selective abortion and published from the year 2000 onwards was sought via bibliographic database and citation searching. \nResults – volume and nature of the research A sizeable international literature in relation to sex-selective abortion was found totalling 332 studies. The country of focus was India in almost half (153) of these studies, China in 79 studies (24%), and Asia (not including India, China or Pakistan) in 37 (11%) of studies. \nOECD countries were examined in 23 (7%) reports of 20 relevant studies (four secondary, linked reports of existing analyses were identified). Six unique studies focussed upon populations within the UK, five the US, four Canada, two Greece, two Norway and one Italy. \nThe extent of sex-selective abortion taking place in a population is often assessed by examining the sex ratio at birth (SRB) – the number of boys born alive per 100 girls born alive. The research in this map appeared to examine relatively few confounders or moderators of the SRB, although this is likely due to the constraints imposed by analysis of pre-existing datasets. \nConclusions/Further research To the extent that it is possible, future research should give further consideration to important confounders such as socio-economic status, marital status, birth order, parity and parental age. Future research might also be situated within the context of alternative explanations for perturbations and prevailing trends in the SRB. \nIn order to establish the extent to which sex-selective abortion is taking place in UK-relevant contexts, relevant studies would have to be subjected to critical appraisal to assess the reliability of their findings. Where results are robust but inconsistent, examination of the scope of the studies and the specification of their analytical models would be required in order to explain mixed and conflicting findings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".