In the second of two blogs, Jeff Aronson considers how the word “data” is used in bioscience publications and discusses who owns data and collections of data. Usage Whether we can use etymology or grammar to settle the question of the singularity or plurality of “data” (it appears to be both), we can determine […]
Category: Jeffrey Aronson
A Word About Evidence: 7. Data—etymology and grammar
In the first of two blogs, Jeff Aronson considers the etymology of the word “data” and grammatical aspects of its usages, with the intention of discussing who owns data and collections of data. I was recently verbally accosted (the word is not too strong) by a professor of computing science who demanded to know […]
A Word About Evidence: 3. Manifesto
A manifesto for Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) was published in the BMJ earlier this year and presented at Evidence Live. Jeff Aronson has been thinking again about the word manifesto. The Indo-European root MAN meant a hand. The Latin word was manus, from which we get words such as maintain, manacle, manage, manège, manicure, manipulate, […]
A Word About Evidence: 2. Meta-analysis
The history of the statistical procedure called meta-analysis begins with GV Glass, who invented the word in the 1970s. But the history of the word itself begins long before that, with Aristotle. Jeff Aronson The Greek preposition μετα had several meanings, depending on whether it governed the accusative, genitive, or dative case. With the […]
A Word About Evidence: 1. We need an ology
Evidence-based medicine was invented in about 1990, but we still don’t have an ology word to describe it or its practitioners (its ologists). Jeff Aronson Most biosciences, with some exceptions (see the examples), have an ology, and their practitioners can be called ologists. So what should we call the practice of EBM and its […]