Bare bones,or a rich feast? Taking care with context in a data rich world

Providing a rich context has become a sine qua non of principled teaching of applied statistical thinking. With increasing opportunities to access secondary data, there should be increasing opportunity to work with rich context. We review the contextual information provided in 41 data sets suitable for introductory tertiary statistics teaching, available in the R “datasets” package, and investigate the source information for four data sets. We find failure to describe and retain important contextual information, including aspects that raise questions about the credibility of the data for statistical inference. The sanitization of data reduces the opportunities for learning meaningful lessons in statistical thinking and the real-world application of statistics. We advocate for teachers and users of such data to be curious about the provenance and context, and for the curators and distributors to examine, where possible, the primary sources, to accurately preserve the context and optimize pedagogical opportunities.     

Open access and predatory publishing: a survey of the publishing practices of academic pharmacists and nurses in the United States

Objective:Academics are under great pressure to publish their research, the rewards for which are well known (tenure, promotion, grant funding, professional prestige). As open access publishing gains acceptance as a publishing option, researchers may choose a “predatory publisher.” The purpose of this study is to investigate the motivations and rationale of pharmacy and nursing academics in the United States to publish in open access journals that may be considered “predatory.”Methods:A 26-item questionnaire was programmed in Qualtrics and distributed electronically to approximately 4,500 academic pharmacists and nurses, 347 of whom completed questionnaires (~8%). Pairwise correlations were performed followed by a logistic regression to evaluate statistical associations between participant characteristics and whether participants had ever paid an article processing fee (APF).Results:Participants who had published more articles, were more familiar with predatory publishing, and who were more concerned about research metrics and tenure were more likely to have published in open access journals. Moderate to high institutional research intensity has an impact on the likelihood of publishing open access. The majority of participants who acknowledged they had published in a predatory journal took no action after realizing the journal was predatory and reported no negative impact on their career for having done so.ConclusionThe results of this study provide data and insight into publication decisions made by pharmacy and nursing academics. Gaining a better understanding of who publishes in predatory journals and why can help address the problems associated with predatory publishing at the root.     

A Simulation Study Evaluating the Generalized Additive Model for Assessing Intervention Effects with Small Samples

Single subject (SS) designs are popular in educational and psychological research. There exist several statistical techniques designed to analyze such data and to address the question of whether an intervention has the desired impact. Recently, researchers have suggested that generalized additive models (GAMs) might be useful for modeling nonlinear effects that are common with SS designs. This study sought to extend the use of GAM from SS to a research design in which individuals may be placed in separate groups and receive different interventions. Results of the simulation study found that using a mixed model form of GAM (GAMM) resulted in higher power for detecting actual effects in the population than was true for either GAM or a Bayesian GAM estimator. Thus, GAMMs are recommended for use with SS designs when interventions are expected to induce nonlinear relationships between time and the outcome variable and individuals receive different treatments.