Wolfgang Viechtbauer

Cartoon picture of an artillery fun shooting a bunch of questionnaires at a person with the words "A BATTERY OF QUESTIONNAIRES" at the top.

Whenever I read 'battery of questionnaires', I think of ...

Given that John Watts studied psychology, you can't tell me that the band name Fischer-Z is not actually based on Fisher's r-to-z transformation (and that the 'fish's head' pun was invented later).

For people in #academia -- What's the oldest email in your inbox that you still plan to respond to at some indeterminate timepoint in your life? (in other words: Please make me feel better about my inbox of shame)

You arrive at #Oslo airport, stand at the baggage claim, wonder why you have wifi, and realize that #eduroam works in the entire airport.

Structural and practical identifiability analysis of partially observed dynamical models by exploiting the profile likelihood Abstract. Motivation: Mathematical description of biological reaction networks by differential equations leads to large models whose parameters are calibra

This one also touches on the same issues: doi.org/10.1093/bioi...

plotannotate: Annotate Plots Interactively annotate 'base R graphics' plots with freehand drawing, symbols (points, lines, arrows, rectangles, circles, ellipses), and text. This is useful for teaching, for example to visually exp...

The plotannotate package (#RStats) is now on CRAN:

cran.r-project.org/package=plot...

The package allows users to annotate base R graphics plots with freehand drawing, symbols, and text. This is useful for teaching (e.g., to visually explain certain plot elements) and creating quick sketches.

A review of spline function procedures in R - BMC Medical Research Methodology Background With progress on both the theoretical and the computational fronts the use of spline modelling has become an established tool in statistical regression analysis. An important issue in splin...

The paper about splines in R that I wish I had known about when I was learning splines in R.

bmcmedresmethodol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

That's using Command, right? Control should given "ctrl-f" (and so on).

Yeah, Command isn't captured by getGraphicsEvent(). But Control works as intended. Thanks!

I got confirmation over at Mastodon that this returns ctrl-F ctrl-B, and ctrl-I (as expected).

Would somebody using #Rstats under macOS be so kind and do the following:

x11()
plot(1)
getGraphicsEvent(onKeybd=function(key) return(key))

then click on the plot, and hit control-f (and the same with control-b and control-i) and tell me what it shows in the console?

Happy to finally share the preprint for our work on how affective inertia differs within-days and overnight (with Stacey Scott, Martin Sliwinski, Josh Smyth, @wviechtb.bsky.social chtb.bsky.social‬ and @aneubauer.bsky.social) 1/4

You might be underestimating how nerdy the crowd is. A considerable part of the people in that group grew up with C64s and fondly remember cracker intros and the demo scene.

Depends on what the code is doing. Some things can benefit greatly from parallel processing, others not at all. But in the former case, users can usually do the parallelization themselves (esp. for problems that are embarrassingly paralizable), so then rewriting code in C might be more useful.

Interested in research synthesis, meta-analysis, systematic reviews, methodology, software, guidelines, best practices? 😀 📊

This #YouTube channel is really the best spot to learn and meet our community! 👇

A "Mr. McMahon reaction meme" where McMahon shows increasing levels of amazement/excitement, with levels "I^2", "tau^2", and "prediction interval", and "predictive distribution".

YouTube video by ESMARConf ESMARConf2025: Keynote - Misunderstandings and misuses of commonly-cited methods... - Julian Higgins

Planning to do a systematic review?
Do watch this very informative presentation first!
Julian Higgins talks about improper use of:

PRISMA reporting guideline
I-squared statistics
Test for asymmetry in funnel plots
Random effects model

#ESMARConf2025

m.youtube.com/watch?v=wRA0...

I love auto translations. "The Tasmanian-led approach to random-effects meta-analysis". 😕 Didn't know that there was a Tasmanian school for meta-analysis! Learning something new every day. #ESMARConf2025

YouTube video by ESMARConf ESMARConf2025: Tutorial metaselection: Meta-analytic selection models with... - James Pustejovsky

Super interesting talk by James Pustejovsky (@jepusto.bsky.social) and Martyna Citkowicz at #ESMARConf2025 on the metaselection package, which provides cluster-robust inference methods and clustered bootstrapping to account for dependencies in selection models: youtu.be/2qGcVeEqtBY

ESMARConf About ESMARConf The Evidence Synthesis Hackathon’s (https://www.esmarconf.org) Evidence Synthesis & Meta-Analysis in R Conference (#ESMARConf2025) will take place on 11th-13th of June 2025. ESMARConf ...

#ESMARConf2025 is live (www.youtube.com/@esmarconf), starting with a talk by @asanchez-tojar.bsky.social on "Practising what we preach: Rethinking standards in meta-analysis for ecology and evolution". At 11am CEST, I will give a talk on how to visualize the amount of heterogeneity in forest plots.

On Thursday evening during my weekly live stream on R and statistics, I will do something meta-analysis related in connection with #ESMARConf2025. Further details about my live streams can be found here: www.wvbauer.com/doku.php/liv...

2025 - ESMARConf

Just a reminder that #ESMARConf2025 is starting tomorrow! This is a free online conference about evidence synthesis and meta-analysis using #Rstats. Further details can be found here: esmarconf.org/2025/

Tuberculosis still kills around 1.3 million people every year.

It was once a massive killer in Europe and the US, but not anymore. How did these countries manage to tackle it?

Our first article on TB in a three-part series: ourworldindata.org/tuberculosis...

Every scientific institute should follow this path. There is no moral stance for spending so much public money on bad software that sacrifices your sovereignty. Word/Excel are not the worst of it. e.g. The Max Planck Society spends millions of Euros annually for shitty MS calendar/email.

Hadn't heard about Sci-Net (sci-net.xyz) as a platform for requesting / sharing papers (essentially a #CanIHazPDF website). Not sure how I feel about the use of cryptocurrency tokens for this purpose (more on this at: sci-hub.se/sci-net).

conicfit: Algorithms for Fitting Circles, Ellipses and Conics Based on the Work by Prof. Nikolai Chernov Geometric circle fitting with Levenberg-Marquardt (a, b, R), Levenberg-Marquardt reduced (a, b), Landau, Spath and Chernov-Lesort. Algebraic circle fitting with Taubin, Kasa, Pratt and Fitzgibbon-Pilu...

Another case of the #RStats package ecosystem blowing my mind. I needed to find the nearest ellipse given a set of (x,y) coordinates. Of course there is an R package for that: cran.r-project.org/package=coni...

10/10; super cool resource!

I will teach my advanced #MetaAnalysis course this year (September 24-26, 2025):

www.wvbauer.com/doku.php/cou...

Since my regular meta-analysis course is also overdue, I decided to extend the advanced course by an extra day to cover the standard methods more thoroughly.

I will do an extra 'Open Online R Stream' (www.wvbauer.com/doku.php/liv...) next week Thursday (2025-05-29) at the usual time (6pm CEST). I will talk about syntax style guides, syntax formatting, and take a look at the styler and lintr packages and the new Air formatter software from Posit.

GitHub - wviechtb/plotannotate Contribute to wviechtb/plotannotate development by creating an account on GitHub.

Here is something for 'base R graphics' aficionados: github.com/wviechtb/plo...

The package allows you to annotate plots by freely drawing on the plot device with the mouse (works for 'windows' and 'x11' plotting devices). Various symbols and text can also be added.

#RStats