This week in PLoS Medicine: Improving data collection and estimation methods for mortality

Read the new papers published in PLoS Medicine this week, including three Research Articles and a Perspective that highlight the importance of gathering accurate information on numbers of deaths, and suggest ways of improving estimates in countries where complete vital registration systems do not exist.

The first paper evaluates the performance of a set of demographic methods estimating the fraction of deaths registered and counted by civil registration systems, and identifies three variants that generally perform the best, the second paper uses data from 166 demographic and health surveys to develop and validate new empirically based methods of estimating under-five mortality, and the third paper describes a novel method, the Corrected Sibling Survival method, that measures adult mortality in countries without good vital registration by use of histories taken from surviving siblings.

The related Perspective discusses these three research articles that address the measurement and analysis of child and adult mortality data collected through death registration, censuses, and household surveys.

You can comment on, annotate, and rate this week’s PLoS Medicine articles and any of the others in the archive.