Median Watch

Eyes on statistics

Australia does not want to share health data

I am a statistician. I rely on data for my career. Luckily data is everywhere, so I’m often spoilt for choice. One place where I no longer look for existing data is the health and medical system in Australia. This comes from multiple painful experiences of spending months on approval processes that end in failure. Ad nauseum examples Many other researchers have spoken about the difficulties of accessing health data for research in Australia.

Not waving but drowning in data

Our paper examining trends in acronyms in abstracts was recently published in eLife. We examined over 26 million abstracts from the PubMed database, which is easily the largest data set I’ve ever used. In this post I talk about some of the challenges and benefits of dealing with such a massive data set. Data greed One of the most common mistakes I see researchers — new and experienced — make is to collect too much data.