Training Informal Supporters to Improve Responses to Victim-Survivors of Domestic Violence and Abuse: A Systematic Review.

Informal supporters (friends, family, colleagues, and community members) play a crucial role in societal-wide responses to victim-survivors of domestic violence and abuse. Familial and social networks, however, report a sense of helplessness and difficulties in knowing how to respond. This mixed method systematic review examines the effectiveness, and perceived effectiveness, of training informal supporters to improve their responses to victim-survivors. A novel conceptual framework was developed to underpin the review. A systematic search of four electronic databases, specialist repositories, and websites were used to identify empirical research (in academic or gray literature). Eleven included studies examined educational interventions that aimed to improve responses from informal supporters. Quality appraisal was undertaken, and studies were judged to be "good enough" for synthesis. The studies in the review indicated that informal supporters recognized the value of training for building understanding and equipping them with the skills to respond to victim-survivors. The synthesis identified statistically significant improvements in the knowledge and attitudes of informal supporters in the immediate and short-term following training. Using a behavior change model to frame the evidence, the review found that training/educational activities prime informal supporters to respond to victim-survivors, as well as enhancing their capacity and motivation to do so. This increases the likelihood that informal supporters will take action to support victim-survivors of abuse. We don't know, however, what type of support they will provide and/or whether it would be judged to be helpful by victim-survivors.

Ethically Driven and Methodologically Tailored: Setting the Agenda for Systematic Reviews in Domestic Violence and Abuse.

Purpose: Systematic reviews have an important, and growing, role to play in the global evidence eco-system of domestic violence and abuse. Alongside substantive contributions to knowledge, such reviews stimulate debates about ethical reviewing practices and the importance of tailoring methods to the nuances of the field. This paper aims to pinpoint a set of ethical and methodological priorities to guide and enhance review practices specifically in the field of domestic abuse. Method: The five Pillars of the Research Integrity Framework (ethical guidelines for domestic abuse research) are used to interrogate the systematic review process. To do so, the Framework is retrospectively applied to a recently completed systematic review in domestic abuse. The review included a rapid systematic map and in-depth analysis of interventions aimed at creating or enhancing informal support and social networks for victim-survivors of abuse. Results: Ethical and methodological priorities for systematic reviews in domestic abuse include (1) Safety and wellbeing: maintaining the wellbeing of researchers and stakeholders, and appraising the ethics of included studies, (2) Transparency/ accountability: transparent reporting of research funding, aims and methods together with explicit consideration of authorship of outputs, (3) Equality, human rights and social justice: developing diverse review teams/ Advisory groups, and review methods that aim to search for, and report, diverse perspectives. Considering researcher positionality/ reflexivity in the review, (4) Engagement: collaboration with non-academic stakeholders and individuals with lived experience throughout the review process, (5) Research Ethics: independent ethical scrutiny of systematic review proposals with input from researchers with expertise in systematic reviews and domestic abuse. Conclusion: Additional research is required to comprehensively examine the ethics of each stage of the review process. In the meantime, attention should be given to the underpinning ethical framework for our systematic review practices and the wider research infrastructure that governs reviews.

PROTOCOL: Informal social support interventions for improving outcomes for victim-survivors of domestic violence and abuse: An evidence and gap map.

This is the protocol for a Campbell Evidence Gap Map. The main objectives of the EGM are: establish the nature and extent of the primary empirical evidence on informal social support interventions, identify interventions and clusters of evidence suitable for systematic review/evidence synthesis and identify gaps in the evidence on informal social support interventions.

Improving MeSH classification of biomedical articles using citation contexts.

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) are used to index the majority of databases generated by the National Library of Medicine. Essentially, MeSH terms are designed to make information, such as scientific articles, more retrievable and assessable to users of systems such as PubMed. This paper proposes a novel method for automating the assignment of biomedical publications with MeSH terms that takes advantage of citation references to these publications. Our findings show that analysing the citation references that point to a document can provide a useful source of terms that are not present in the document. The use of these citation contexts, as they are known, can thus help to provide a richer document feature representation, which in turn can help improve text mining and information retrieval applications, in our case MeSH term classification. In this paper, we also explore new methods of selecting and utilising citation contexts. In particular, we assess the effect of weighting the importance of citation terms (found in the citation contexts) according to two aspects: (i) the section of the paper they appear in and (ii) their distance to the citation marker. We conduct intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations of citation term quality. For the intrinsic evaluation, we rely on the UMLS Metathesaurus conceptual database to explore the semantic characteristics of the mined citation terms. We also analyse the "informativeness" of these terms using a class-entropy measure. For the extrinsic evaluation, we run a series of automatic document classification experiments over MeSH terms. Our experimental evaluation shows that citation contexts contain terms that are related to the original document, and that the integration of this knowledge results in better classification performance compared to two state-of-the-art MeSH classification systems: MeSHUP and MTI. Our experiments also demonstrate that the consideration of Section and Distance factors can lead to statistically significant improvements in citation feature quality, thus opening the way for better document feature representation in other biomedical text processing applications.

UniPrime2: a web service providing easier Universal Primer design.

The UniPrime2 web server is a publicly available online resource which automatically designs large sets of universal primers when given a gene reference ID or Fasta sequence input by a user. UniPrime2 works by automatically retrieving and aligning homologous sequences from GenBank, identifying regions of conservation within the alignment, and generating suitable primers that can be used to amplify variable genomic regions. In essence, UniPrime2 is a suite of publicly available software packages (Blastn, T-Coffee, GramAlign, Primer3), which reduces the laborious process of primer design, by integrating these programs into a single software pipeline. Hence, UniPrime2 differs from previous primer design web services in that all steps are automated, linked, saved and phylogenetically delimited, only requiring a single user-defined gene reference ID or input sequence. We provide an overview of the web service and wet-laboratory validation of the primers generated. The system is freely accessible at: http://uniprime.batlab.eu. UniPrime2 is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Licence.