Paperguide Research Reference
Research Glossary
Every term defined with cited sources, real world examples, interactive learning, and the methodological depth that serious research demands.
Built for Researchers Who Need Precision, Not Guesswork
How diseases and exposures are measured in populations: incidence, prevalence, risk ratios, odds ratios, diagnostic accuracy and the biases that distort them. These terms help you read observational and diagnostic research with a critical eye.
Active surveillance is a public health monitoring method in which health authorities regularly and proactively solicit reports from healthcare providers, laboratories, and other data sources rather than waiting for notifications to arrive passively.
The attack rate is the proportion of persons exposed to a specific pathogen, toxin, or hazard who develop the disease or condition of interest within a specified time period.
Diagnostic accuracy refers to the ability of a test to correctly identify the presence or absence of a target condition in comparison to a reference standard (often called the gold standard).
A diagnostic test accuracy (DTA) review is a specialized type of systematic review that evaluates the performance of one or more diagnostic tests by synthesizing data on sensitivity, specificity, and other accuracy metrics across multiple primary studies.
Dose response describes the relationship between the amount, intensity, or duration of an exposure (the "dose") and the magnitude of the resulting biological or clinical effect (the "response").
Incidence is an epidemiological measure that quantifies the frequency of new cases of a disease, injury, or other health event arising within a defined population during a specified period.
The index case is the first identified case of a disease or condition in a population or epidemiological investigation.
Positive predictive value (PPV) is the probability that a person who receives a positive test result truly has the condition being tested for.
Prevalence is the proportion of a defined population that has a particular disease, condition, or characteristic at a specific point in time (point prevalence) or during a specified period (period prevalence).
A receiver operating characteristic curve is a graphical plot that illustrates the diagnostic performance of a binary classification system across all possible decision thresholds by plotting the true positive rate (sensitivity) on the vertical axis against…
Relative risk, also called the risk ratio, is the ratio of the probability of an event occurring in an exposed or treated group to the probability of the same event occurring in an unexposed or control group.
Relative risk reduction (RRR) is the proportional decrease in the risk of an event in the treatment group compared to the control group, calculated as one minus the relative risk and typically expressed as a percentage.
A screening test is a procedure applied to an asymptomatic population to identify individuals who may have a disease, condition, or risk factor that warrants further diagnostic evaluation.
In diagnostic testing, sensitivity is the ability of a test to correctly identify individuals who have the condition, calculated as the number of true positives divided by the total number of individuals who actually have the condition (true positives plus…
In diagnostic testing, specificity is the ability of a test to correctly identify individuals who do not have the condition, calculated as the number of true negatives divided by the total number of individuals who truly do not have the condition (true…