Date: Wednesday 16 August 2023

Time: 5:50-7:00pm ACST

Venue: Online (see Zoom link below)

Speaker: Dr. Jennie Louise, South Australian Women’s and Children’s Hospital Research Centre and the Biostatistics Unit, SAHMRI

Title: The Role of Statisticians in Addressing the Poor Quality of Clinical Research

Abstract

Doug Altman famously wrote in 1994 about the ‘scandal of poor medical research’.  More recently, a spate of articles have noted that little has changed in the intervening decades: a large amount of clinical research is simply very bad.  While attention has focused on outright fraud, and on the ubiquity of questionable research practices such as p-hacking and HARKing, much of bad medical research can be attributed to poor statistical practices and a widespread misunderstanding of the place of statistics, and the statistician, in the research process. Commonly advocated solutions such as changing incentive structures, sharing of data and analysis code, or abandoning statistical significance – are important but are not sufficient to solve the problem of bad clinical research.  I present an overview of the problems, the reasons for their intractability, and some thoughts about what we, as statisticians, can do to improve statistical understanding and practice in clinical research.

About Dr. Jennie Louise

Jennie Louise is senior biostatistician at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital Research Centre and the Biostatistics Unit, SAHMRI, where she provides statistical support for clinical research, with a particular focus on training early career researchers, and improving the quality of clinical research within the WCH Network.  In the past she has worked on large longitudinal clinical trials and observational studies, as well as providing statistical consultancy services at the University of Adelaide and independently.

Zoom link:

https://unisa.zoom.us/j/83529544144?pwd=bW9zRStuOXZqRFdBUmNkNGVzdnArUT09

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