17.11.2024

New Open-Access Publication in Scientific Reports by Dr. Judith Beier and Colleagues

Published article in Scientific Reports

We are pleased to share that Dr. Judith Beier, a long-term fellow at our center, together with co-authors Matteo Santon (center member) and Dr. Hannes Rathmann (former fellow), has published a new open-access study in Scientific Reports titled "Estimating trauma prevalence from incomplete human skeletal remains.” 

In this study, a simulation framework based on empirical forensic, clinical, and archaeological data is used to compare the performance of two approaches for estimating trauma prevalence from incomplete skeletal samples: conventional frequencies and generalized linear models. Findings show that model-based estimates outperform frequencies. The former are consistently more precise across different levels of incompleteness, while frequencies increasingly often produce incorrect relative trauma patterns between samples or fail to produce any estimates as skeletal completeness decreases. Although not explicitly tested, these findings should, in principle, also apply to various types of pathological skeletal lesions scored for prevalence assessments.

Read the full study here.