Research data should be shared. This view is widespread in academia and common among research funders. Regardless, most research datasets remain locked away. Sometimes data are held back for less than admirable reasons, but they can also be held back with good intent. For example, access to data is sometimes restricted in order to maximize opportunities for early career researchers to publish papers using the data. I believe this is instead counter-productive for ECRs.
The image below is from the WHO, and I don’t like it.
Seán Millar and I were recently asked to review a paper. In his review, he pointed out the difference in predicting an outcome vs. identifying risk factors for an outcome. It is an important point I have clumsily tried to convey in other reviews, but he put it so nicely I asked if I could quote him here (I’ve made a few small editorial changes, mainly intended to generalize what he wrote).
There is a recent PLoS ONE article on obesity getting quite a bit of attention. The article, Hunter-Gatherer Energetics and Human Obesity, reports research looking at total energy expenditure in a sample of adults from a Tanzanian hunter-gatherer tribe, the Hadza. Given their “traditional physically active lifestyle” the authors expected that Hadza to have lower body fat and to expend more energy than modern, Western populations, and the aim the research was to see if this was in fact true.
Have you been asked to peer-review the statistical aspects of a research paper? Here are some helpful resources.
People who know me know that I hate being asked how to lose weight. Yes, I study nutrition for a living. Yes, I teach a class called Obesity and Public Health. This doesn’t mean I have a satisfying answer to the question of how to lose weight. Instead, I have a very unsatisfying answer.
I eventually had to stop telling people that I studied obesity. Backyard barbeques, grocery stores, a friend’s house, it didn’t matter. It was always the same question. “How do I lose weight?” Again, and again, and again.
I recently read a paper (via @yusunbin) in the American Journal of Public Health concluding (among other things) that “infants sharing a sleep surface” was a contributor to Sudden Unexpected Infant Deaths (SUIDs; a classification that includes deaths due to SIDS, suffocation, or undetermined causes).