What is missing is the recognition that the 'patterns' we can see are an incomplete and abstract product of past human agency or behavior that cannot be worked backwards from, but must be envisioned as mechanisms in action.
Excluding criteria include (1) reviews, comments, or letters, (2) low-quality or incomplete data, (3) abstract only and lack of the full text, without author's reply, and (4) reduplicate publication.
This could have caused a disproportionate exclusion of significant or non-significant findings resulting in publication bias, but the incomplete data of abstracts entail uncertainties and did not allow us to perform validity assessments.
Unfortunately, after publication of this article (Chan and Ramli 2018), it was noticed that the Results section within the abstract was incomplete.
Studies of preparations containing B serrata in combination with other ingredients, 2 3 non-randomised trials, 4 5 and abstracts reporting incomplete data for evaluation were excluded.
Qualitative data were sparse and an incomplete reporting of data in abstracts and reports limited the evaluation of quality.
The exclusion criteria of the meta-analysis were (1) studies with duplicate data; (2) studies with incomplete data; and (3) reviews, abstracts, and meta-analysis.
An overpass to nowhere, now an abstract symbol of the incomplete (slide 6).
These operations facilitate the development of a sound and complete transition function, for reasoning about effects of actions in the presence of incomplete information, and a set of abstract algorithms for planning.
