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There is a difference between reading and studying a paper. Many papers I just check the abstract for claims of A causes/correlates B (ie it is a "headline" cla
by nonbel 9y ago
There is a difference between reading and studying a paper. Many papers I just check the abstract for claims of A causes/correlates B (ie it is a "headline" claim), and look for a scatter plot of A vs B (it is missing).
Then I do ctrl-F "blind" (can't find it), ctrl-F "significance" (see p-value with nearby text indicating it has been misinterpreted). Boom, paper done in under a minute. There is really no reason to study such papers unless they have some very specific information you are searching for (like division rate of a certain cell line or something).
- nonbel 9y agoSpeaking of which, the first link in this article about help with statistics goes to a site that misinterprets p-values: "This means that if the experiment suggests that the probability of a chance event in the experiment is less than this critical value, then the null hypothesis can be rejected." https://explorable.com/statistical-hypothesis-testing https://explorable.com/statistical-hypothesis-testing
- EternalData 9y agoAh, frequentist interpretation of results. I don't think it's going to be something people are fond at looking back on.
- Denvercoder9 9y agoThis only works for a very small subset of studies in a subset of scientific fields.
- nonbel 9y agoAgreed, the OP was about medical research though, where it does apply.
- iron0012 9y agoThe importance you place on the presence of a p-value suggests that you're probably not the best judge of whether a p-value is correctly interpreted.
- nonbel 9y agoI'm not sure what you mean. You think it is unimportant if people do not understand the tools they use to draw conclusions from their data? The presence of the misunderstood p-value is just the easiest, most obvious heuristic for "authors and/or reviewers do not know how to analyze their data".