Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Contact, publication, and social network information about Harvard faculty and fellows.

Observer Variation

"Observer Variation" is a descriptor in the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus, MeSH (Medical Subject Headings). Descriptors are arranged in a hierarchical structure, which enables searching at various levels of specificity.

The failure by the observer to measure or identify a phenomenon accurately, which results in an error. Sources for this may be due to the observer's missing an abnormality, or to faulty technique resulting in incorrect test measurement, or to misinterpretation of the data. Two varieties are inter-observer variation (the amount observers vary from one another when reporting on the same material) and intra-observer variation (the amount one observer varies between observations when reporting more than once on the same material).


This graph shows the total number of publications written about "Observer Variation" by people in Harvard Catalyst Profiles by year, and whether "Observer Variation" was a major or minor topic of these publication.
Bar chart showing 1476 publications over 30 distinct years, with a maximum of 92 publications in 2013
To see the data from this visualization as text, click here.
Funded by the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences through its Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program, grant number UL1TR002541.