Median Watch

Eyes on statistics

I got my first real job because I could play football

I say real job, because I’d been working whilst studying as a dishwasher, packer, waiter, bingo operator, book-binder, and in a bookies. The interviews for these jobs were straightforward, turning up on time and in the right place got you half way there. My first real interview – way back in 1994 – was for a graduate statistician position at a big drug company in the UK. They paid my train ticket, put me up in a hotel, and took all the candidates out for dinner.

Posted by Adrian Barnett Thursday, September 5, 2024

Publishing "negative" results

We’ve just published the world’s first randomised trial of funding (paper available here). We ran a truly novel study, using a gold standard study design, and with a published protocol. So why did it take two years to get through peer review? Too much care Our team also recently published a large randomised trial about reducing unnecessary care at the end of life (paper available here). A completely different area to funding, but again an important research question, with a strong study design, and a peer reviewed protocol.

Posted by Adrian Barnett Monday, August 12, 2024

Checking BibTeX files against the Retraction Watch database

Last week I saw Alison Avenell give a great talk titled “Improving the integrity of published research: How, when, and if?’’ This was on her experience of finding fraudulent papers and what actions the journals took to correct the record – which was too often nothing. One of Alison’s recommendations was to avoid inadvertently citing retracted papers by checking against the wonderful Retraction Watch database. For those using reference management software such as Zotero this is already done for you.

Posted by Adrian Barnett Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Here’s why you should (almost) never use a pie chart for your data

Reproduced from The Conversation Our lives are becoming increasingly data driven. Our phones monitor our time and internet usage and online surveys discern our opinions and likes. These data harvests are used for telling us how well we’ve slept or what we might like to buy. Numbers are becoming more important for everyday life, yet people’s numerical skills are falling behind. For example, the percentage of Year 12 schoolchildren in Australia taking higher and intermediate mathematics has been declining for decades.

Posted by Adrian Barnett & Victor Oguoma Thursday, February 15, 2024

What is the AIMOS conference?

A cover of Science from 2018 (available here) shows two giant scientists peering down on other scientists at work. It is a great image to describe metascience, also known as meta-research or the “science of science”. This is the growing field of scientifically studying science, with the aim of understanding why it sometimes fails and how we can make it better. At AIMOS (Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science) we are the giant scientists peering down on our colleagues.

Posted by AIMOS conference committee Friday, October 13, 2023