Tony Roberts

Honored to be named an ASHEcon 2025 Diversity Scholar! Grateful for this recognition as DEI faces scrutiny across sectors. Thanks to ASHEcon, Arnold Ventures & Compass Lexecon for showing diverse voices are essential in health economics. See you in Nashville! #ASHEcon2025

👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾

The 25 days of chRistmas: an R advent calendaR Thank you for your interest in this advent calendar and learning R! R is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. At first, it can be really overwhelming, but after you pick up the basics,...

It's Dec 1 and you want to finally start learning R? The R advent calendaR by @kiirsti.bsky.social is an excellent place to start. Do it now! #rstats kiirstio.wixsite.com/kowen/post/t...

Wow!

Screenshot of the article. Title: The Color of Ideas: Racial Dynamics and Citations in Economics. Authors: Marlene Koffi, Roland Pongou, and Leonard Wantchekon. NBER Working Paper No. 33150. Published November 2024. JEL No. A14, I23, J15. Abstract reads: This paper investigates the existence of racial disparities in the dissemination of ideas using the paper citation network in economics. Exploiting a comprehensive dataset of over 330,000 publications from 1950 to 2021, combined with manually collected data from the CVs of thousands of economists, we document that papers authored by non-White scholars (Black, Hispanic, or Asian) receive 5.1% to 9.6% fewer citations than those authored by White scholars. The citation gap remains or even amplifies with increasing author seniority and conventional quality indicators and is especially pronounced for Black authors. Moreover, papers authored by non-White scholars are less likely to serve as citation bridges and are less often cited by highly cited papers as measured by the centrality indexes, limiting both their direct and indirect influence. Our analysis indicates that this disparity is not attributable to differences in research quality, author ability, or visibility. Rather, it is largely driven by homophily in citation patterns and racial clusters in networks, where scholars tend to cite authors from their racial group. These findings can be rationalized by a simple theoretical model where citation costs and peer-review preferences influence citation behavior. Then, we provide suggestive evidence that reducing information friction—thereby lowering the cost of citing—could reduce the racial citation gap by up to 50%. Finally, using natural language processing, we highlight the complementarity across racial groups in research and discuss potential losses from racial barriers to idea diffusion.

When people ask me why I don't care about my h-index, citations, etc., I point out that racism means that's a losing game. Cause this ain't just in economics.

www.nber.org/papers/w33150

There aren't too many of you academic epidemiology departments out here on Blue Sky yet, hopefully we can grow this starter pack from its humble foundations to a towering high rise! Please comment as more of you join so I can add you! go.bsky.app/817SC1P

When you’ve got enough PDFs to build yourself a fort 📑📑📑🏰
- after going down a literature rabbit hole 🕳️

Lets actually do some writing ✍️
Since its a blizzard outside anyway …… ☕️

#Saturday #PhD ing
#AcademicSky #MedSky

To other PhD students who may find it helpful to know: I'm not working on a publication. I'm not organizing a conference, or preparing a presentation. I don't have a side project (or 2). I focus on my dissertation, & cannot do more. And that's ok. #PhDLife #AcademicSky @academic-chatter.bsky.social

Social media stopped being social when everyone trying to make money off it

Since I've been here for a while… here are some useful features on Bluesky that you might not have discovered yet! 🧵

Also the last time they did something like this they excluded rural counties from the work requirement, the argument being it’s harder to find work their, but the reality was that rural SNAP users are predominantly white and the law targeted urban, non white communities

By the way, I made this starter pack of some of my colleagues who do health policy related research at KFF and other think tanks & research organizations. If you’d like to be added let me know!
go.bsky.app/4qmDL5f

𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚢𝚝𝚊𝚋𝚕𝚎 0.6.1 for #Rstats is out!

It's an ultra simple, super flexible, and 0-dependency package to draw beautiful tables in HTML, LaTeX, Typst, Word, PDF, and PNG.

And for those who ❤️ documentation, 𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚢𝚝𝚊𝚋𝚕𝚎 ships with a billion pages of tutorials:

vincentarelbundock.github.io/tinytable/

New starter pack if you're looking for the #orms community on here: go.bsky.app/SvBND16

Also if you have recommendations of people to add, feel free to send them my way.

I made a Black women in tech starter pack because I couldn’t find one and it annoyed me.

go.bsky.app/5upv7SQ

Okay made a starter pack for folks into evidence synthesis, systematic review, meta-analysis. I've surely missed people, so please ping with suggestions or self-nominations.
go.bsky.app/JLw77VZ

Reference Collection to push back against "Common Statistical Myths" Note: This topic is a wiki, meaning that this main body of the topic can be edited by others. Use the Reply button only to post questions or comments about material contained in the body, or to sugge...

I have some refs below that I use as a reviewer, responding to reviewers, and as a stat methods collaborator. This information is not unique, many statisticians have posted similar lists (such as Andrew Althouse discourse.datamethods.org/t/reference-...) but hopefully can still be helpful. 1/n

ACA and health policy nerds

go.bsky.app/9HMShsJ

go.bsky.app/3wc2Q3G #BlackMedSky follow us

Prevalence of Iron Deficiency and Iron-Deficiency Anemia in US Females Aged 12-21 Years, 2003-2020 This study examines prevalence of iron deficiency among females aged 12 to 21 years to inform future screening strategies for iron deficiency and iron-deficiency anemia.

We found that almost 40%(!!) of females between 12 and 21 years of age are iron deficient!

And yet there’s no recommended universal screening.

Wonder how different things would be if it predominantly affected males?!

tinyurl.com/JAMAFe

Hello #EpiSky! 👋 We wanted to give everyone a chance to introduce themselves - if you're a fan of #epidemiology, please respond to this thread telling us a little about yourself! Who are you? What are you working on? What is something you're looking forward to?

✋🏾

A new starter pack

Women commenting on a range of topics relating to health, care and the determinants of health and inequalities.

go.bsky.app/FDUBGFf

Alright, I started a starter pack of DAG people. Nominate yourself or others to join.

I no longer know who is here, so nominations are important!

go.bsky.app/SAGK5iC

📊When teaching or giving a talk, do you like presenting plots step by step, revealing e.g. one group at a time? This is often useful for walking through complex results.

I made a R package that makes it extremely easy to do this!

ggreveal: Reveal a ggplot incrementally
#rstats #dataviz #ggplot2

This is one of the best #rstats blog posts I've ever read. I refer back to it often!

My fav starter packs so far, a thread:

stats: go.bsky.app/Ki7PjpS
stats: go.bsky.app/7TBN5rX
causal inference: go.bsky.app/FdemGAZ
package devs: go.bsky.app/N1569Qh
data peeps: go.bsky.app/8TdEfdK
medical stats: go.bsky.app/ArqEz36
bioinformatics: go.bsky.app/Ha64Gmv
r-ladies: go.bsky.app/Vgxwa2F

This looks neat! I’m curious would this work with using a citation manager like Zotero? I know that might be a stretch