3 ms·

Honest, slightly OT question: what motivates researchers to perform and publish studies with low N? Can it have a positive or negative impact on their career?

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> what motivates researchers to perform and publish studies with low N? Consider the systemic perspective. There are problems where we have no idea what's going on. (The pool of possibilities is so big, relative to the budget, that it's practically infinite.) In these cases, lots of low-N studies could be better than a few high-N ones. It's a balance between the odds of your study giving a false result against the odds of picking the wrong hypothesis.
- wuschel 9y ago
  That - or the results are based on one of those low quality medical research studies that is performed by medical students in order to get their MD in some countries.
nhaehnle 9y ago
Performing studies with low N makes it more likely for spurious effects to pass the various statistical effects. Therefore, it makes it more likely to obtain a result that can be published (despite being wrong).
- criddell 9y ago
  I would think that a high n study finding no relationship between telomere length and diet would be very publishable.
  - nhaehnle 9y ago
    Traditionally not really, unfortunately. The problem is that negative results usually don't allow you to tell a story. The solution to this is a publication process where you register studies before you do them, in exchange for guaranteed publication once you're done with them. Different fields are further along in establishing such processes. (I've never worked in an empirical field myself, just reporting what I hear from a psychologist friend.)
digitalzombie 9y ago
> what motivates researchers to perform and publish studies with low N? You mean low observations/ data point? It's really simple in the medical world. Money. Longitudinal data mean following people over years. Imagine how much money we have to pay these people for 100 people and say for just 5 years. Medical data/ experiment isn't cheap. You can do it with rats but it doesn't represent human. And iirc FDA found only 50% of what happen to rats can be replicated to Human when they look at the drug result. They have Assays now but I'm not sure how well it represent real subject. The ways FDA does it at least for NTCR is we test for liver toxicology to make things cheaper using assays data. Instead of real human being.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

> what motivates researchers to perform and publish studies with low N? Consider the systemic perspective. There are problems where we have no idea what's going on. (The pool of possibilities is so big, relative to the budget, that it's practically infinite.) In these cases, lots of low-N studies could be better than a few high-N ones. It's a balance between the odds of your study giving a false result against the odds of picking the wrong hypothesis.

wuschel 9y ago
That - or the results are based on one of those low quality medical research studies that is performed by medical students in order to get their MD in some countries.

nhaehnle 9y ago

Performing studies with low N makes it more likely for spurious effects to pass the various statistical effects. Therefore, it makes it more likely to obtain a result that can be published (despite being wrong).

criddell 9y ago
I would think that a high n study finding no relationship between telomere length and diet would be very publishable.
- nhaehnle 9y ago
  Traditionally not really, unfortunately. The problem is that negative results usually don't allow you to tell a story. The solution to this is a publication process where you register studies before you do them, in exchange for guaranteed publication once you're done with them. Different fields are further along in establishing such processes. (I've never worked in an empirical field myself, just reporting what I hear from a psychologist friend.)

digitalzombie 9y ago

> what motivates researchers to perform and publish studies with low N? You mean low observations/ data point? It's really simple in the medical world. Money. Longitudinal data mean following people over years. Imagine how much money we have to pay these people for 100 people and say for just 5 years. Medical data/ experiment isn't cheap. You can do it with rats but it doesn't represent human. And iirc FDA found only 50% of what happen to rats can be replicated to Human when they look at the drug result. They have Assays now but I'm not sure how well it represent real subject. The ways FDA does it at least for NTCR is we test for liver toxicology to make things cheaper using assays data. Instead of real human being.