Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Wikipedia And Medicine: Quantifying Readership, Editors, And The Significance Of Natural Language, James M. Heilman, Andrew G. West

Andrew G. West

BACKGROUND: Wikipedia is a collaboratively edited encyclopedia. One of the most popular websites on the Internet, it is known to be a frequently used source of healthcare information by both professionals and the lay public.

OBJECTIVE: This document quantifies: (1) The amount of medical content on Wikipedia, (2) the citations supporting Wikipedia’s medical content, (3) the readership of medical content, and (4) the quantity/characteristics of Wikipedia’s medical contributors

METHODS: Using a well-defined categorization infrastructure we identify medically pertinent English Wikipedia articles and links to their foreign language equivalents (Objective 1). With these, Wikipedia’s API can be queried to produce metadata …

Estimating Controlled Direct Effects Of Restrictive Feeding Practices In The `Early Dieting In Girls' Study, Yeying Zhu, Debashis Ghosh, Donna L. Coffman, Jennifer S. Williams

Debashis Ghosh

In this article, we examine the causal effect of parental restrictive feeding practices on children’s weight status. An important mediator we are interested in is children’s self-regulation status. Traditional mediation analysis (Baron and Kenny, 1986) applies a structural equation modelling (SEM) approach and decomposes the intent-to-treat (ITT) effect into direct and indirect effects. More recent approaches interpret the mediation effects based on the potential outcomes framework. In practice, there often exist confounders that jointly influence the mediator and the outcome. Inverse probability weighting based on propensity scores are used to adjust for confounding and reduce the dimensionality of confounders simultaneously. …