There is evidence that many (and possibly most) of the conclusions drawn from biomedical research are probably false (Ioannidis, 2005). In a 2013 Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper entitled “Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience”, Button et al. explained how low statistical power is partly to blame for a similar issue in the field of neuroscience.
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The scientist’s lab notebook is essentially a record of all scholarly activities conducted. However scientists often find it difficult to keep, or know how to keep, a good lab notebook. In 2015, PLoS published an editorial providing guidance on how to keep a good lab notebook. Here is a summary of a few key points: Record all scientific activities in
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If you have been paying attention to the scientific tabloids (if there is such a thing), the headlines would continually be filled with claims that modern science is having a crisis of confidence. In big bold letters, tabloids would announce there is a REPRODUCIBILITY CRISIS in science. But is all this due to a handful of grumpy scientists who got
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Sometimes we would like to focus more on some data and less on others, but still provide a visual display. The matplotlib function gridspec allows subplots of unequal size to be plotted on the same figure. How this function can be applied will be demonstrated using simulated data. Let’s simulate some common probability distributions of different statistics using Python’s numpy.random
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The computer age has seen many advances in science, including how scientists analyse data and report results. While some tools are complex and make it difficult for other scientists to understand exactly what steps were followed, other tools strive to increase the transparency and reproducibility of research. iPython and Jupyter notebooks A new and exciting tool is the electronic notebook.
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