A complex process like risk assessment and the subsequent risk management decision makingshould be regularly evaluated, in order to assess the need to improve its workings. In this thesisthree related matters are addressed: evaluation of environmental risk management strategies,evaluation of environmental risk assessments, and how ecotoxicity data from the open scientificliterature can be used in a systematic way in regulatory risk assessments. It has resulted in thefollowing: a publically available database with ecotoxicity data for pharmaceuticals (Paper I); anevaluation and review of the Swedish Environmental Classification and Information System forpharmaceuticals (Papers II and III); a comparison of current reliability evaluation methods and areliability evaluation of ecotoxicity data (Paper IV); and an improved reliability and relevancereporting and evaluation scheme (Paper V).There are three overall conclusions from this thesis:(1) Ecotoxicity data from the open scientific literature is not used to the extent it could be inregulatory risk assessment of chemicals. Major reasons for this are that regulators prefer standarddata and that research studies in the open scientific literature can be reported in a way that affectstheir reliability and the user-friendliness. To enable the use of available data more efficiently actionsmust be taken by researchers, editors, and regulators. A more structured reliability and relevanceevaluation is needed to reach the goal of transparent, robust and predictable risk assessments.(2) A risk assessment is the result of the selected data and the selected methods used in theprocess. Therefore a transparent procedure, with clear justifications of choices made, is necessaryto enable external review. The risk assessments conducted within the Swedish EnvironmentalClassification and Information System for pharmaceuticals vary in their transparency and choice ofmethod. This could come to affect the credibility of the system since risk assessments are notalways consistent and guidelines are not always followed.(3) The Swedish Environmental Classification and Information System for pharmaceuticalscontribute, in its current form, to data availability and transparency but not to risk reduction. Thesystem has contributed to the general discussion about pharmaceuticals’ effect on the environmentand made data publicly available. However, to be an effective risk reduction tool this is not sufficient. / <p>QC 20121119</p> / MistraPharma / Formas - Evaluation of the Swedish Environmental Classification and Information System for Pharmaceutcals.

The focus of this study was to evaluate different search engines on Swedish text. Information retrieval is widely used by both people and organizations, and it is important to be able to efficiently retrieve needed information at the right time. The study determined that relevance and speed are the most important factors in search engines. The evaluation measures the precision and recall which are relevance measurements, and speed of two search engines, Elastic search and MarkLogic. The evaluation has determined that there is no significant difference in the relevance of the retrieved results between the engines. The evaluation has also determined that there is a statistically significant difference in speed between the engines, with Elastic search outperforming MarkLogic. Both search engines performed very well in terms of successful searches, meaning to return a relevant document in the first 20 results. Both engines succeeded in fulfilling the information need 96% of the time. / Fokus för denna studie var att utvärdera olika sökmotorer på svensk text. Informationshämtning används i stor utsträckning av både människor och organisationer, och det är viktigt att effektivt kunna hämta nödvändig information vid rätt tidpunkt. Studien fastställde att relevans och hastighet är de viktigaste faktorerna för sökmotorer. Utvärderingen mäter precision och recall som är relevansmätvärden och responstid som hastighetmätvärde för två sökmotorer, Elasticsearch och MarkLogic. Utvärderingen har visat att det inte finns någon signifikant skillnad i relevansen av de hämtade resultaten mellan motorerna. Utvärderingen har också visat att det finns en statistiskt signifikant skillnad i hastighet mellan motorerna, där Elasticsearch överträffar MarkLogic. Båda sökmotorerna presterade väldigt bra när det gäller lyckade sökningar, vilket innebär att returnera ett relevant dokument i de första 20 resultaten. Båda motorerna lyckas uppfylla informationsbehovet 96% av tiden.