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
Author Archives: pmean
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
PMean: Validating a test of diabetes
Dear Professor Mean, I have a simple algorithm that determines whether a person is diabetic or not. I am planning on validating this algorithm, and I need to know how many patients I need to sample. Is there a formula I could use? 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
PMean: What not to say in the limitations and alternative strategies section of your grant
I was reviewing a grant and the section on limitations and alternative strategies started off with the following sentence, “We do not anticipate any major limitations in conducting this research.” I suggested in my comments that this was a bad way to start off this section. Here’s why. Continue reading
Recommended: Beyond Bar and Line Graphs: Time for a New Data Presentation Paradigm
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
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