Matt Parkes

(Also, more cynically, it's a way to turn an otherwise difficult to write inconclusive paper into something poignant with an actual message, so more likely for people to a) read it b) care about it, and c) publishers to accept it)

So true. Create a roadmap of what we need to know to address the question. Especially in systematic reviews: You've literally just assessed the state of the literature, so rather than just saying "it's inconclusive, more research needed *shrug*", tell us *what* is needed and *how* to do it!

Confidence Intervals for Adaptive Trial Designs I: A Methodological Review Regulatory guidance notes the need for caution in the interpretation of confidence intervals (CIs) constructed during and after an adaptive clinical trial. Conventional CIs of the treatment effects a...

Confidence Intervals for Adaptive Trial Designs I: A Methodological Review. David S. Robertson, Thomas Burnett, Babak Choodari-Oskooei, Munya Dimairo, Michael Grayling, Philip Pallmann, Thomas Jaki. Statistics in Medicine. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Confidence Intervals for Adaptive Trial Designs II: Case Study and Practical Guidance In adaptive clinical trials, the conventional confidence interval (CI) for a treatment effect is prone to undesirable properties such as undercoverage and potential inconsistency with the final hypot...

Confidence Intervals for Adaptive Trial Designs II: Case Study and Practical Guidance. David S. Robertson, Thomas Burnett, Babak Choodari-Oskooei, Munya Dimairo, Michael Grayling, Philip Pallmann, Thomas Jaki. Statistics in Medicine. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

New UK Clinical Trial Regulations & GCP standards to take effect from 28 April 2026 – find out what this means ⬇️

The changes are designed to enhance patient safety, streamline approvals and strengthen the UK as a global leader:

t.co/4TpYglBtnC

@researchwales.bsky.social

Reporting guideline for chatbot health advice studies: the Chatbot Assessment Reporting Tool (CHART) statement The Chatbot Assessment Reporting Tool (CHART) is a reporting guideline developed to provide reporting recommendations for studies evaluating the performance of generative artificial intelligence (AI)-...

Reporting guideline for chatbot health advice studies: the Chatbot Assessment Reporting Tool (CHART) statement bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/4/1/... #llms #chatbots #bioinformatics #healthcare

Check out our latest preprint 📣 TADA guidelines 📣

TADA (Transferable, Accessible, Documented, Annotated) helps researchers across disciplines share code, with the ultimate goal of increasing code availability & its quality.

Brilliantly led by @eivimeycook.bsky.social

🔗 doi.org/10.32942/X2D...

New publishing models will only work if authors embrace them Complaints about the broken academic publishing system have been around for years and are getting louder. A common theme is that with the r...

Here's a quick blogpost about alternative publishing models. You can bring a horse to water, and indeed wave the bucket temptingly under its nose, but it is likely to gallop off elsewhere. deevybee.blogspot.com/2025/07/new-...
@ec.europa.eu @wellcometrust.bsky.social

I think if you're using VS Code to edit your Quarto you can fire up a 'Live Share' session and all collaboratively code/write at the same time, but I've not worked with a) a big enough team of statisticians to warrant this or b) non-stats collaborators tech-savvy enough to want to do this.

Typst alone, or Quarto (converted to Typst)? For collaboration, I tend to use Quarto to write the paper, compile to a .pdf via Typst or to a MSWord doc, and then email to collaborators since it's easier for them to comment/amend. It's not a nice interactive situation like Overleaf would be.

It's basically 'new slimline LaTeX' - simpler syntax, quicker to compile.

New paper in BMJ (Research Methods & Reporting):

“Dealing with continuous variables and modelling non-linear associations in healthcare data: practical guide”

led by Pedro Lopez-Ayala & Tobias Zimmermann with & myself

www.bmj.com/content/390/...

Introducing the Simulation Studies Preregistration Template: Q&A with Björn S. Siepe, František Bartoš, and Samuel Pawel Initially submitted through COS’s open call for community-designed preregistration templates, the Simulation Studies Template is now part of the expanding collection of preregistration resources available on the OSF.

Simulation studies are widely used, but have historically lacked clear guidance around preregistration.

In response to this gap, a team of researchers have developed a new template for preregistering simulation studies, now available on OSF.

🚀 Read our Q&A: www.cos.io/blog/intr...

Easily download files from the Open Science Framework with Papercheck Researchers increasingly use the Open Science Framework (OSF) to share files, such as data and code underlying scientific publications, or ...

New blog post: Easily download files from the Open Science Framework with Papercheck daniellakens.blogspot.com/2025/07/easi...

Downloading all files in an OSF project can be a hassle. Not anymore, with Papercheck! Just run:

osf_file_download("6nt4v")

Me too!

New #rstats blog up!

solomonkurz.netlify.app/blog/2025-07...

This is the third post in the series where we use {brms} to learn {Stan} code. Here we discuss mean-centered predictors and extra fancy model matrices.

Have you wanted to understand what is meant by “trustworthy” research? Attend this #webinar where @davidhosch.bsky.social, @neiloconnell.bsky.social, @jdwilko.bsky.social, @nadiasoliman.bsky.social, @lesleyuttley.bsky.social, and more outline how to produce reliable evidence bit.ly/44GBtGP

Example:

Related: My favourite thing to point out to folks doing DAGs - every arrow is an assumption, but every ‘not an arrow’ is also an assumption.

Expert Reviews and News on Laptops, Smartphones and Tech Innovations Notebookcheck provides in depth reviews, technical articles like benchmark comparisons, and news on laptops / notebooks, smartphones, tablets and tech innovations.

The reviews on www.notebookcheck.net usually have a section on keyboards and give you a bit of information. Not about the ‘clickety clackness’, sadly, but I think you can glean if it’s half decent to bash out lots of emails on.

NEW PAPER in @bmj.com "Dealing with continuous variables and modelling non-linear associations in healthcare data: practical guide"

--> www.bmj.com/content/390/...

#methodologymatters #StatsSky #EpiSky

Second day of the Royal Soc Future of Science Publishing conference #FutureSciPub. This morning we start with a panel on leveraging digital infrastructure to go beyond traditional journal/article model.

We have reluctantly returned to in person exams for all methods modules because it is the only way to ensure integrity, but it also penalises certain kinds of students. The vast majority of students don’t use AI, the minority make things worse for the majority.

My new contribution to Nature, a review of the book Unreliable by C.Szabo. The book explores the irreproducibility crisis in biomedical research and engagingly addresses both structural problems in science and scientific fraud. Full or irony, caricatures & common sense
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Make sure you can understand the solution the LLM is giving you - it’s a tool to facilitate your code, not a replacement for thinking. If you can’t understand the solution it gives you, how do you know it’s right?!

blog post about imputation:

With nonresponse worsening, we want to adjust for a lot of covariates.

This often means handling many missing covariates.

In theory, fit one big model for everything. But how can practitioners handle this ?

The data viewer is absolutely brilliant, love it. Just having cute li’l histograms for your variable by default is so helpful.

Agree! ‘Real world’ is another nebulous term like ‘standard of care’, ‘intention to treat’ and ‘treatment as usual’ which mean different things to different people. Being really specific about what you mean is key…

Adherence to RECORD reporting guidelines among observational studies using routinely collected health data published in general medical journals: a meta-epidemiologic study - Journal of Clinical Epidemiology www.jclinepi.com/article/S089...