Tag Archives: Writing research papers

PMean: A rant about the “reader pays” model of publication

Something came up in our department about a predatory pay for access journal that was soliciting support. All the appropriate warnings were made (there’s a nice explanation of predatory open access publishing at Wikipedia, if you’re curious). But I felt that I had to made a strong defense of the value provided by legitimate open access publishers. Here’s a summary of what I wrote. 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

Recommended: Transparent reporting of a multivariable prediction model for individual prognosis or diagnosis (TRIPOD): the TRIPOD Statement

If you are writing up a paper that uses a complex regression model (complex meaning multiple independent variables), you need to document information that allows the reader to assess the quality of the predictions that your model would produce. This paper provides a checklist of things that you need to document in such a paper, and is an extension of the CONSORT guidelines to this particular type of research. Continue reading