Quantifying and addressing the prevalence and bias of study designs in the environmental and social sciences.

Building trust in science and evidence-based decision-making depends heavily on the credibility of studies and their findings. Researchers employ many different study designs that vary in their risk of bias to evaluate the true effect of interventions or impacts. Here, we empirically quantify, on a large scale, the prevalence of different study designs and the magnitude of bias in their estimates.

Spatial foraging segregation by close neighbours in a wide-ranging seabird.

Breeding seabirds are central-place foragers and therefore exploit food resources most intensively nearer their colonies. When nesting aggregations are close to one another density-dependent competition is likely to be high, potentially promoting foraging segregation (i.e.

Effects of alien plants on insect abundance and biomass: a food-web approach.

The replacement of native plants by alien species is likely to affect other trophic levels, particularly phytophagous insects. Nevertheless, the effect of alien plants on insect biomass has not yet been quantified. Given their critical role in transferring energy from plants to higher trophic levels, if alien plants do affect insect biomass, this could have far-reaching consequences for community structure.

[Preservation of the liver using a new solution of phosphate-buffered saccharose].

The efficacy of the new phosphate-buffered sucrose solution (PBS), was compared with the conventional Euro-Collins (EC) and the lactated Ringer solution (LR), in its capacity to preserve the canine liver in cold storage. Three groups of 6 canine livers, each group in one of those solutions, were put in cold storage for 24 h at 4 degrees centigrade. At the end of this period the effect of warm hepatic reperfusion was studied in relationship with the following parameters: weight of the liver, bile excretion, hepatic biopsy, Na, K, Ca, P and some tests used to evaluate the hepatic function.

[A comparative study of gallbladder function using echography and HIDA-CCK].

This paper compares two methods of evaluating gall-bladder function after stimulation with cholecystokinin (CCK); One, the echographic method, permits the gall-bladder contraction study by determining variations in face area of the organ. The other, the scintigraphic method (HIDA-CCK test), studies of the gall-bladder emptying registering the decreases of activity by external counts. Out of 20 studies performed: 8 cases presented a contractile response and normal emptying; 7 had an abnormality late initial response (Ti) and contraction and emptying (defined by T1/2) slower than normal.