Bias
The word "bias" often means influence in an unfair way, for example, that dominant media are biased towards western culture and points of view or that a person has "a bias towards radical points of view", or that databases have a language-bias (cf., van Leeuwen et al., 2001).

The underlying view may be that neutrality and objectivity should be the ideal. Bias may, however, also be seen as something positive, as media, libraries and knowledge organizing system that are accommodated to particular needs. The Danish classification system DK5, for example, is biased towards Danish interests.

The term may be applied to documents and knowledge production and is an important aspect of the quality of documents.

The concept is also applied in statistics and research methods in a similar meaning:

"Bias: [In statistics.] A systematic error or deviation in results or inferences from the truth. In studies of the effects of health care, the main types of bias arise from systematic differences in the groups that are compared (selection bias), the care that is provided, exposure to other factors apart from the intervention of interest (performance bias), withdrawals or exclusions of people entered into a study (attrition bias) or how outcomes are assessed (detection bias). Reviews of studies may also be particularly affected by reporting bias, where a biased
subset of all the relevant data is available.
 

Bias prevention: Aspects of the design or conduct of a study designed to prevent bias. For controlled trials, such aspects include randomisation, blinding and concealment of allocation." (Higgins & Green, 2005, Glossary).
 

In Library and Information Science (LIS) has "bias relation" been given a special meaning by Ranganathan.  Ranganathan uses this term about documents from one discipline written for readers in another discipline, for example, statistics for librarians, or psychological for physicians. Ranganathan operates in Colon Classification with 6 so-called "phase relations": "general", "bias", "comparison", "difference", "tool" and "influencing". These phase relations are kinds of non-hierarchical relations between two subjects.

Literature: 

Higgins, J. P.T. & Green, S. (Eds.). (2005). Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions 4.2.5 [updated May 2005]. In: The Cochrane Library, Issue 3, 2005. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Available at: http://www.cochrane.org/resources/handbook/hbook.htm

van Leeuwen, T. N.; Moed, H. F.; Tijssen, R. J. W.; Visser, M. S. & Van Raan, A.F.J. (2001).
Language biases in the coverage of the Science Citation Index and its consequences for
international comparisons of national research performance. Scientometrics, 51(1), 335-346.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.(2005). Bias. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias

For Wikipedia's policy on avoiding bias, see

Birger Hjørland

Last edited: 14-06-2006

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