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Objectives: Medical education is gaining in significance internationally. A growing interest in the field has been observed in German-speaking countries (Austria, Germany, Switzerland) since the early 2000s. This interest is not, however, reflected in an increase in the number of publications on medical education of German-speaking authors in international professional journals. The following investigation examines the potential use of active participant numbers of German-speaking researchers at AMEE conferences as a means of measuring said development., Methods: The AMEE conference proceedings from the categories poster presentations, short communications, research papers and plenary presentations from the years 2005-2013 were examined for evidence of Austrian, German and Swiss participation. The abstracts were subsequently analysed in terms of content and categorised according to study design, methodology, object of study, and research topic., Results: Of the 9,446 analysed abstracts, 549 contributions show at least one first, last or co-author from Austria, Germany or Switzerland. The absolute number of contributions per conference varied between 44 in 2010 and 77 in 2013. The percentage fluctuated between 10% in 2005 and 4.1% in 2010. From the year 2010 onwards, however, participation increased continually. The research was predominantly descriptive (62.7%). Studies on fundamental questions of teaching and learning (clarification studies) were less frequent (4.0%). For the most part, quantitative methods (51.9%) were implemented in addressing subjects such as learning and teaching methods (33%), evaluation and assessment (22.4%) or curriculum development (14.4%). The study population was usually comprised of students (52.5%)., Conclusions: The number of contributions from Austria, Germany and Switzerland peak at the beginning and at the end of the evaluated period of time. A continual increase in active participation since 2005 was not observed. These observations do not reflect the actual increase of interest in medical education research in German-speaking countries.

Investigation of Empiricism. On Ernst Mach's Conception of the Thought Experiment. The paper argues that Ernst Mach's conception of the thought experiment from 1897/1905 holds a singular position in the lively discussions and repeated theorizations that have continued up to the present in relation to this procedure. Mach derives the thought experiment from scientific practice, and does not oppose it to the physical experiment, but, on the contrary, endows it with a robust relation to the facts. For Mach, the thought experiment is a reliable means of determining empiricism, and at the same time a real, because open and unbiased, experimenting. To shed light on this approach, the paper carries out a close reading of the relevant texts in Mach's body of writings (in their different stages of revision) and proceeds in three steps: first, Mach's processual understanding of science will be presented, which also characterizes his research and publication practice (I. 'Aperçu' and 'Sketch'. Science as Process and Projection); then in a second step the physiological and biological justification and valorization of memory and association will be examined with which Mach limits the relevance of categories such as consciousness and will (II. The Biology of Consciousness. Or The Polyp Colony); against this background, thirdly, the specific empiricism can be revealed that Mach inscribes into the thought experiment by on the one hand founding it in the memory and association, and on the other by tracing it back to geometry, which he deploys as an experimenting oriented to experience (III. Thinking and Experience. The Thought Experiment)., (© 2015 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.)

This paper arises out of my research which I have been conducting in the context of my dissertation project. It explores the relationship between teaching, research and collecting practices in Viennese anatomy during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In a time in which Viennese medicine tried to reinvent itself through both the creation of a new curriculum and several other institutional measures the practice of establishing comparative and human anatomical collections can be seen as a strategic key field of action. By concentrating on scientific journals, popular texts, catalogues, correspondences and specimens this paper aims at revealing specific social systems which must be understood as parts of the 'social history' of Viennese anatomy. By looking closely at these social aspects of anatomical teaching and research, this work tries to contribute to recent discussions addressed by historians of science and medicine.

Objective: A potential problem with meta-analysis concerns missing studies due to publication bias. This paper focuses on one subtype of publication bias, namely selection bias (studies with unfavorable outcomes tend to be suppressed), wherein the main interest is in determining the proportion of unpublished studies., Methods: As in the well-known trim and fill method, the key assumption is that studies with quantitative outcomes extremely unfavorable for the treatment are not published. Along with the assumption of a normal distribution for the complete set of published and unpublished studies, the proportion of unpublished studies is estimated by the degree of truncation from a left-truncated normal distribution. In addition, the mean and variance of this distribution are obtained in order to provide useful information regarding the mean effect of a treatment vs. a control, and the variance of this effect when controlling for truncation. The degree of truncation can be considered under two hypotheses: the true mean equals the estimated mean or the true mean is equal to zero., Results: The uncorrected degree of truncation was found to be overestimated, but this bias was reduced when correcting for chance truncation. To incorporate additional information, weighted analysis was proposed. Instead of unweighted mean and variance of the published outcomes, their weighted analogues were used for analysis, with the weights expressing varying credibility across studies entering the meta-analysis. One hypothetical and three empirical examples illustrated the approach., Conclusion: The new method is very simple and its results are comparable to other meta-analytic methods. However, in contrast to existing methods, it can be applied to the study-specific outcomes alone.