Category Archives: Yleinen

Subscribing to this blog’s updates

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I have added a widget to the side bar and a page with a form to subscribe to this blog. After you subscribe, you will receive an e-mail when a post is published. You can also chose a specific subject if you like, but as this is at the moment a low traffic blog, I suggest that you subscribe to all subjects. You can access the subscription form from the menu bar.

(The current version is a bit buggy in that each time a post is edited and updated a new e-mail is sent immediately. I will try to solve this soon.)

“Reproducible research” is a hot question

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I have long been interested in the question of reproducible research and as a manuscript author, reviewer and more recently, editor, have attempted to make sure that no key information was missing and that methods were described in full detail and, of course, valid.

Although the problem has always existed, I think that in recent years papers and reports with badly described methods have become more frequent. I think that there are many reasons for this: 1) the pressure to publish quickly and frequently as a condition for career advance, 2) the overload on reviewers work’ and the pressure from journals to get manuscript reviews submitted within a few days’ time, 3) the stricter and stricter rules of journals about maximum number of “free” pages, and 4) the practice by some journals of publishing methods at the end of the papers or in smaller typeface, implying that methods are not important for most readers, and irrelevant for understanding the results described (which is a false premise).

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Some frequent ways of unwillingly misrepresenting experimental results

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Many students and some researchers are ignorant of the fact that any of the following practices are statistically invalid and could be considered to be ‘research-results manipulation’ (=cheating):

  1. Repeating an experiment until the p-value becomes significant.
  2. Reporting only a ‘typical’ (=nice-looking) replication of the experiment, and presenting statistics (tests of significance and/or parameter estimates such as means and standard errors) based only on this subset of the data.
  3. Presenting a subset of the data chosen using a subjective criterion.
  4. Not reporting that outliers have been removed from the data presented or used in analyses.