Median Watch

Eyes on statistics

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

On slowing down

Last month I wrote a piece in Nature to announce that I’m going to halve my research output. For me, the reasons are clear. Publication numbers are skyrocketing and are now being supercharged by researchers using AI to write papers. Many papers are now created simply to pad CVs and have no scientific value. The scientific community needs to be careful with the limited resource that is peer review and must focus on quality over quantity.

Posted by Adrian Barnett Sunday, March 8, 2026

Funding schemes that cost more than they award: part 2

“What is the purpose of research funding?” Phew, that is a big question. If I could hear your answers, I am sure there would be a wide range of opinions. Let’s put that in the too hard basket. What about this question, “What should research funding not do?" Again, I can imagine lots of answers, but there are likely some answers that we could all agree on. How about an axiom that “A research funding scheme should never cost more than it awards.

Posted by Adrian Barnett Wednesday, February 5, 2025

90% of scientific research is crap

Reading Adrian Edmondson’s excellent autobiography, he mentioned Sturgeon’s law which is: “Ninety percent of everything is crap”. Adrian is a comedian and was applying the law to his creative work. Sturgeon was using it talk about science fiction, but I think it also applies to scientific research, and Sturgeon’s number is strikingly similar to the estimate from Chalmers and Glasziou that 87.5% of health and medical research is wasted (which they rounded down to 85%).

Posted by Adrian Barnett Tuesday, January 7, 2025

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