Monthly Archives: May 2015

PMean: I am now a number in the ORCID database

Life in the world of research is complicated, but it gets worse when you have a relatively common last name like “Simon.” There are thousands of research publications written by a Simon, and narrowing it down to “Simon S” or even “Simon SD” doesn’t seem to help. So how do you quickly identify all the publications that you have written? One way is to apply for a unique identifier from ORCID, an “open, non-profit, community-based effort to provide a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers.” Continue reading

Recommended: Developing Grant Proposals: Guidelines for Statisticians Collaborating Under Limited Resources

This article provides guidance for developing the “statistical considerations” section of a research grant. I normally do not use that term, and suggest separate sections on statistical methods, sample size justification, data management plan, etc. But that’s a quibble. This is very good practical advice, such as reminding you that you need to write both for the statistical reviewer and the non-statistician who is also reviewing the proposal. Continue reading

Recommended: PLOS ONE 2014 Reviewer Thank You

I don’t do nearly enough peer reviewing, in part because it is a thankless, anonymous task. But one journal editor sent me a nice email pointing out that my name was listed along with 80,000 other reviewer names for helping out with peer review of an article in 2014 for PLOS ONE. If you click on the link on the article and go down about 61,000 lines, you’ll find my name. Caution, the list is not quite perfectly in alphabetical order (Simons and Simonton should come AFTER Simon). Continue reading

PMean: Can I replace missing values with zero?

Dear Professor Mean, I have a large data set from a household budget survey with 20,000 records. When I calculate the mean for some of the variables, there are some missing values. Sometimes it is an average of almost 20,000 observations and sometimes is an average of much less than 20,000. Can I replace all the missing values with zero so I am averaging exactly 20,000 observations for each variable? Continue reading

Recommended: Training on how to write a grant

I usually do not recommend commercial products, as I know most of you have very limited funds. But when it comes to grants, you should consider paying for good training. The best grant writing class I ever took was from David Morrison, who is part of Grant Writers Seminars and Workshops. Also good are the seminars produced by the Grant Training Center. Details on both groups are listed below. Continue reading