Omission of quality assurance during data entry in public health research from India: Is there an elephant in the room?

As the adage, 揋arbage in, Garbage out� goes, data entry errors may lead to erroneous results and conclusions. Quality assurance during data entry is one of the most neglected components of research and is conspicuously missing in most of the reporting standards. In this study, we reviewed research studies published in Indian Journal of Public Health and Indian Journal of Community Medicine during 2014�16 and determined the proportion of papers reporting on quality assurance during data entry. Of 110 papers, only 6 (5.5%) papers explicitly included a statement about data quality assurance, with two studies reported to have performed double entry and validation, considered the gold standard in quality-assurance of data entry. This is highly unacceptable. We hereby appeal to the community of researchers, peer reviewers, and journal editors in India to pay attention to this important aspect of research and make reporting of quality assurance of data entry mandatory in every published paper.

Nation-Wide Registry of Vascular Diseases

Incidence of vascular diseases in Korea has been increasing and their researches are undertaken actively. However, experience of single institute about various vascular diseases is to be limited, a nationwide vascular registry is needed for sharing common protocols and experiences. We devolped a customized vascular registry program calling VasBase for nation-wide sharing and analysis. The characteristics of VasBase are as follows; clinician-oriented intuitive software, complete adherence to vascular protocols based on practical experiences, error-free input by presetting numeric codes, data protection, multi-user tasking, integration of graphic data, open source, easy modification of protocol and one-step export to statistical analysis software. We propose this VasBase as a nation-wide vascular registry program.