Median Watch

Eyes on statistics

Sniffing out a bad statistic

My friend and medical colleague John Fraser once said to me that I could sniff out a bad dataset like he could sniff out a patient in trouble. Regardless of their blood results or history, John can look at a patient, and his instincts tell him that’s something wrong. John has seen a lot of patients, I have seen a lot of numbers. Your skills build up. Homeless numbers Earlier this year, my local council turfed out many homeless people who were living in tents in local parks.

Posted by Adrian Barnett Friday, July 24, 2026

Experimenting with peer review

RORI’s interesting report on the future of peer review noted a lack of cross-over of ideas between peer review in funding and peer review in journals. Having worked on both, I have ideas. Lotteries for journals Conditional lotteries are becoming popular with funders. After we were publicly made fun of for suggesting them with the Australian NHMRC in 2015, they are now all over the world. They are popular because they reduce biases, save time, and appear to increase diversity.

Posted by Adrian Barnett Sunday, July 12, 2026

Ethics transparency

Why aren’t ethics applications publicly available? If not the full application, then at least the investigators' names, the title, a plain language summary, the application number, and the date it was approved. A public record would help confirm that the research actually took place. We live in a world where entire papers can be written in under 30 minutes. Many thousands of researchers are using this new technology to boost their CVs with meaningless papers.

Posted by Adrian Barnett Thursday, June 11, 2026

Beating the panel drum

There’s been another call to “Bring back panels!” for the NHMRC, this time published in Science. These calls normally appear on social media on the day of major funding announcements, when the majority of people find out that they’ve been unsuccessful and vent their frustrations. There are some scientists who, when their applications are rejected, don’t consider that it was bad luck or that there’s some flaw in their ideas. Instead, they conclude that the system must be wrong and therefore must be changed.

Posted by Adrian Barnett Tuesday, June 2, 2026

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs feature in the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel where two lone children drop them along their journey into the forest so that they can find their way home. I’ve been thinking a lot about breadcrumbs and paper trails because the research world is rapidly moving to widely using artificial intelligence, including for generating questions, collecting data, and writing papers. Whilst these uses may sometimes be legitimate and make for faster and better research, it’s now also possible for bad actors to use AI to make a decent quality paper in just 30 minutes.

Posted by Adrian Barnett Monday, March 30, 2026