Many scientists rely on bar graphs and line graphs that effectively reduce your data to a single mean per group. Even with the addition of error bars, the whole process tends to hide important information. These authors suggest that scatterplots that show every data point would be a better way to present your research data. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: April 2015
Recommended: An Introduction to Social Media for Scientists
It’s easy to mock social media, but these are important tools not just for sharing pictures of the food your eating but for informing your colleagues about your research. This article gives a nice overview of how to effectively use tools like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Continue reading
Recommended: Improving Bioscience Research Reporting: The ARRIVE Guidelines for Reporting Animal Research
A lot of people have adapted and updated the CONSORT Guidelines to reporting clinical trials to handle other types of research. One of these adaptations is the ARRIVE guidelines for reporting animal research. Many of these guidelines follow CONSORT quite closely, but there are details, such as documenting the species and strain of the experimental animals and describing the housing conditions, that are specific to animal experiments. Continue reading
Recommended: Restoring invisible and abandoned trials
Too much research data goes unreported, leading to a serious distortion of the evidence base that clinicians need to make intelligent medical decisions. The authors of this paper in BMJ argue that if you can document that a study has been abandoned before publication, and if you formally requestthe researchers to publish the data, and if they fail to act within a certain amount of time,then the data should be considered public access so that you or anyone else could publish those results. It’s an interesting proposal and one that will generate a lot of controversy. Continue reading
PMean: Equations using MathType
I’m ordinarily not a big fan of commercial software, but one product that I would have a hard time living without is MathType. It produces mathematical equations with ease and the appearance is almost always perfect. It’s hard to do this, especially with equations have lots of superscripts and subscripts. You get the size or spacing wrong and all of a sudden things look really ugly and it is hard to fix. TeX is a very good product, too, but I have grown so used to MathType that it is really hard to make the switch. I had to upgrade MathType recently to version 6.9 and I wanted to experiment with MathType equations on my blog. Here are some examples. Continue reading
PMean: Examining relationships in R
I’m giving a talk for the Kansas City R Users Group on how to get a preliminary impression of relationships between pairs of variables. Here is the R code and output that I will use. Continue reading