In a commentary and a blog post, the editors of PLoS Medicine ask:
....is there still a reluctance to accept that anything useful can be learned from research without numbers?
An old question that tends to generate a lot of heat. Where do you stand on it, within medicine or within your own area of research?
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A couple of days have passed and I had a lot of work-related stuff to catch up with, but I thought I better write a recap now while the iron is still hot and I remember it all. Here we go....
Surprise #1 Last time I went to a SRBR meeting (or for that matter any scientific meeting) was in 2002. I…
This post has been written in advance and scheduled for automatic posting. At the time this post shows up, I'll be sleeping my first night in San Francisco. A few hours later, I'll be at PLoS offices and will hopefully have online access soon after so I can post my first impressions.
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The meme started here, so if you decide to do it yourself, please post a link to that as well (so your post can be tracked).
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If you are a regular reader of this blog, you are certainly aware that PLoS has started making article-level metrics available for all articles.
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I have no objection to qualitative research on principle, but I don't want to do any myself -- because it's too hard. This is why disciplines like biology and physics have made so much more progress than sociology et al.: the latter deal with questions that are exceedingly difficult to formulate in ways that can be tested.
"like biology" eh bill? Like that "representative" figure of a band, blot or N=1 histology slide? sorry but modern molecular biology prioritizes the way data "look" over the quantifiable verification that the results are indeed something other than chance. at least "sociology" has moved beyond that even if the questions are hard for (you) to formulate...
In the fields I study, I'd say it's harder to do quantitative research than qualitative, but I'm not a scientist. I'm just a rhetorician and sometime historian. :)
"Like that 'representative' figure of a band, blot or N=1 histology slide?"
When I see stuff like this in papers I am reviewing, I always insist that proper statitical analysis be performed. And if that means doing more experiments, tough noogies.
Dude, you've seen my blog. I don't like the way modern biology is practiced any more than you do. (Neither does PhysioProf, it seems.) That doesn't take away the fact that biological (or physical... I note you don't seem to have any scorn left over for physics, why is that?) science addresses questions that are easier to test than the questions that arise in sociology, anthropology, etc. At least, it seems that way to my small understanding.
The biggest problem with qualitative science is that it is much easier for someone to see what they want to see and call data that doesn't fit into that an "outlier". It also doesn't allow for someone else to re-examine the findings as easily. I am not a huge fan myself, but i guess that doesn't necessarily mean it has to go.