Healthcare decision makers in search of reliable information that compares health interventions increasingly turn to systematic reviews for the best summary of the evidence. Systematic reviews identify, select, assess, and synthesize the findings of similar but separate studies, and can help clarify what is known and not known about the potential benefits and harms of drugs, devices, and other healthcare services. Systematic reviews can be helpful for clinicians who want to integrate research findings into their daily practices, for patients to make well-informed choices about their own care, for professional medical societies and other organizations that develop clinical practice guidelines. Too often systematic reviews are of uncertain or poor quality. There are no universally accepted standards for developing systematic reviews leading to variability in how conflicts of interest and biases are handled, how evidence is appraised, and the overall scientific rigor of the process. In Finding What Works in Health Care the Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommends 21 standards for developing high-quality systematic reviews of comparative effectiveness research. The standards address the entire systematic review process from the initial steps of formulating the topic and building the review team to producing a detailed final report that synthesizes what the evidence shows and where knowledge gaps remain. Finding What Works in Health Care also proposes a framework for improving the quality of the science underpinning systematic reviews. This book will serve as a vital resource for both sponsors and producers of systematic reviews of comparative effectiveness research.

USDA Forest Service Experimental Forests and Ranges (EFRs) are scientific treasures, providing secure, protected research sites where complex and diverse ecological processes are studied over the long term. This book offers several examples of the dynamic interactions among questions of public concern or policy, EFR research, and natural resource management practices and policies. Often, trends observed – or expected -- in the early years of a research program are contradicted or confounded as the research record extends over decades. The EFRs are among the few areas in the US where such long-term research has been carried out by teams of scientists. Changes in society’s needs and values can also redirect research programs. Each chapter of this book reflects the interplay between the ecological results that emerge from a long-term research project and the social forces that influence questions asked and resources invested in ecological research. While these stories include summaries and syntheses of traditional research results, they offer a distinctly new perspective, a larger and more complete picture than that provided by a more typical 5-year study. They also provide examples of long-term research on EFRs that have provided answers for questions not even imagined at the time the study was installed.

This book presents the thoroughly refereed and revised proceedings of the 14th Monterey workshop, held in Monterey, CA, USA, September 10-13, 2007. The theme of the workshop was Innovations for Requirement Analysis: From Stakeholders' Needs to Formal Designs. The 10 revised full papers included in the book were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and revision. These are preceded by the abstracts of the three keynote talks as well as a detailed introduction to the theme of the workshop, including a case study used by many participants to frame their analyses, and a summary of the workshop's results. The full papers have been grouped thematically under the headings Innovative Requirements Engineering Techniques and Innovative Applications of Natural-Language Processing Techniques.

Integrated Water Management (IWM) deals with the planning and management of water resources by integrating the different issues involved, including ecological, economic, technical legislative, and transboundary. This book offers a general framework for IWM. It includes both the different environmental problems that affect the very different ecosystems and the main methodologies able to face the problem of IWM.