Conducting research with human subjects can be difficult because of limited sample sizes and small empirical effects. We demonstrate that this problem can yield patterns of results that are practically indistinguishable from flipping a coin to determine the direction of treatment effects. We use this idea of random conclusions to establish a…

Describes a study in which several different sets of hypertext links are inserted by different people in full-text documents. The degree of similarity between the sets is measured using coefficients and topological indices. As in comparable studies of inter-indexer consistency, the sets of links used by different people showed little similarity.…

Proposes a model for technical journal deselection based on the Bradford law of distribution. The model's operational prescriptives, characteristics of the Bradford distribution in the field of pediatrics, and relevance to collection management are discussed. (42 references) (KRN)

Presents a method of modeling the relevance relationship in information retrieval to answer the question of the theoretical limits of certain statistical methods. Hypergeometric probability distribution is used to construct an abstract model of a database of MEDLINE records, and results of tests of vector retrieval methods are reported. (28…