From the epitome of crunching numbers, statistical science has traveled a long distance. It is time that it is realized as a management science. This is especially true for biostatistics. I seek to define biostatistics as the science of managing medical uncertanities.
Medical uncertainty is easy to handle when divided into aleatory and epistemic types. These terms may sound new to medicine but are commonly used in seismic science and economics. Aleatory uncertainty in medicine arises from endogenous factors such as inherent biological variation, environmental factors, socio-cultural and psychological factors, random variation due to observers, instruments and laboratories, etc. Epistemic uncertainty arises from lack of knowledge, conceptual errors, non-availability of tools, and biases of various types. These sources are exogenous in nature.
High-impact journals are those considered to be highly influential in their respective fields. The impact factor of journal provides quantitative assessment tool for grading, evaluating, sorting and comparing journals of similar kind. It reflects the average number ofÃÂ citationsÃÂ to recent articles published inÃÂ science and social science journals in a particular year or period, and is frequently used as aÃÂ proxyÃÂ for the relative importance of a journal within its field. It is first devised byÃÂ Eugene Garfield, the founder of theÃÂ Institute for Scientific Information. The impact factor of a journal is evaluated by dividing the number of current year citations to the source items published in that journal during the previous two years.
Last date updated on September, 2024