Median Watch

Eyes on statistics

An apology to the public

Sorry state. A few years ago I thought about writing an article that apologised to the public about the poor state of health and medical research. Their tax pays for this research and they give their time and data, and yet far too often the final results are totally unreliable. In the end I bottled it; too worried about the potential harm to my career. But today I’ve read this important paper from a group of statistical colleagues and it’s given me the nerve to apologise.

Posted by Adrian Barnett Tuesday, June 1, 2021

Most citations are rubbish

Blog pause It’s been a long while between blogs. I won’t bore you with how busy I’ve been, but one thing that’s kept me away from the fun of writing blogs is the “fun” of writing grants. Beans To get more research funding we rightly have to explain the impact of our past funding. It’s possible to get examples of impact by seeing how other researchers have cited your work.

Posted by Adrian Barnett Saturday, March 6, 2021

Dear p-values, it's not me, it's not you, it's everyone else

Yet another p-value run-in. For a recent observational study I tried to limit the use of p-values in the paper. My colleagues wanted more p-values and I had to politely push back. During one team meeting I even offered to put the p-values in if someone could accurately tell me what they meant … silence. Predicting that the reviewers would also want to see more p-values, I added this sentence to the paper’s methods: “We have tried to limit the use of p-values, as they are often misunderstood or misinterpreted, and elected to discuss clinically meaningful differences.

Posted by Adrian Barnett Tuesday, September 8, 2020

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.

Posted by Adrian Barnett Monday, August 3, 2020

Goodbye to all that

Today I end my two year stint as president of the Statistical Society of Australia. As I press “submit” on my presidency, here’s a hodge-podge of reflections. I was delighted to be president, and I will miss being able to say, “I’m the president of the Stats Society”. Statistics has given me an incredible career and I feel I owe something back. It might sound strange to feel a debt to a thing, but statistics is a big thing.

Posted by Adrian Barnett Thursday, July 23, 2020