A recent study found that about 63% of clinicians surveyed agree that immediate release of electronic medical records is more confusing than helpful to patients.

A new research programme aims to define the vital first step in how human immune systems recognise fungal invaders.

To understand the dynamics of emerging topics in science and medicine, researchers from the University of Tsukuba looked at researcher participation in articles containing emerging keywords over 50 years. They found that although more human resources are needed for publication, large research groups less frequently generate emerging topics. Moreover, expertise in certain topics has become important for generating emerging topics, and researchers who generate emerging topics now tend to remain in that field.

Promising new education interventions are potentially being 'unnecessarily scrapped' because trials to test their effectiveness are insufficiently faithful to the original research, a study warns. Researchers ran a large-scale computer simulation to examine how much 'fidelity' compromises the results of school-based trials of new learning innovations and strategies. 'Fidelity' is the extent to which these evaluations adhere to the original research on which the educational intervention is based. At present, more than 60% of interventions are rejected at the evaluation stage because the trials, conducted by organisations such as the What Works Clearinghouse (US) and Education Endowment Foundation (UK), suggest they result in little educational progress. In many cases, however, the fidelity of these trials is not reported. The new study suggests that poor fidelity may mean that sound programmes are being rejected.