By using this information, clinicians can categorize evidence, assess causality, and make evidence-based recommendations.
ECO includes diverse terms for categorizing evidence that supports annotation assertions including experimental types, computational methods, author statements and curator inferences.
In order to evaluate and categorize evidence drawn from low quality studies, we analysed results according to the likelihood that further studies and of better methodological quality would change size and direction of estimates.
Evidence-based pathology relies on systematic reviews of the literature, evaluation of the quality of evidence as categorized by evidence levels and statistical tools such as meta-analyses, estimates of probabilities and odds, and others.
For each report, we i) conducted an authorship analysis by sectoral affiliation; ii) analyzed the types of research evidence cited and categorized the evidence type and institutional nature of the publisher; iii) analyzed key recommendations by extracting recommendations presented in the concluding sections of the documents; and iv) examined the use of indicators.
From each report, and for each intervention area, JB extracted the citations used to support writing on the intervention area, and categorized the evidence type (Table 1) and the institutional nature of the publisher (e.g., peer-review journal, government agency report, etc).
Our original approach of having two independent experienced evidence reviewers (out of a pool of nine) review and categorize the evidence for each recommendation led to too much inconsistency due to the variability of the recommendations and the type of evidence required for each recommendation.
Although different types of evidence were available, community complaints, which are not categorized as systematic evidence, seem to have influence the decision of political actors.
This is typically categorized as 'moderate evidence' in favor of the 'full' model (Wetzels & Wagenmakers, 2012).
When TCDD was categorized, there was evidence of a significant dose response trend (p = 0.02).
