Thursday, November 21, 2013

Link: Twenty tips for interpreting scientific claims


A quick piece in Nature today.

The goal of the Comment is to provide advice to scientific advisers or policy makers about how to interpret scientific work. But, it has broad applicability.

The authors list out 20 tips to think about when interpreting results from scientific studies.

It's a good list for any scientist (young or old) to remember.

Among those:

Correlation does not imply causation.
Extrapolating beyond the data is risky.
Randomization avoids bias.

It's early in the morning, but I'm having a hard time to come up with points they missed...

If anything, I would add:

Models can be overfit.
Science tests parsimony

Still, a good one for the bulletin board.







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