[ RadSafe ] Significant results in abstracts

[John Jacobus]

Rainer,
Thanks for point this article out.  However, the list
or database that the author cited, PubMeb, is
primarily medical articles, not radiation biology.  I
assume that you would have understood this if you had
read the article and not just the absract.

As I had posted in the past:
+++++++++++++++++++
>From an article about physicians doing clinical
studies: 

"It was just before an early morning meeting, and I
was really trying 
to get to the bagels, but I couldn't help overhearing
a conversation between one of my statistical
colleagues and a surgeon.

Statistician: "Oh, so you have already calculated the
P value?"

Surgeon: "Yes, I used multinomial logistic
regression."

Statistician: "Really? How did you come up with that?"

Surgeon: "Well, I tried each analysis on the SPSS
drop-down menus, and that was the one that gave the
smallest P value"."


--- Rainer.Facius at dlr.de wrote:

> 
> "Significant results in abstracts are common but
> should generally be
> disbelieved." !
> 
> Gotzsche P C.
> Believability of relative risks and odds in
> abstracts: cross sectional
> study.
> British Medical Journal 333(2006)231-234
> 
> Queerly, important committees or authors from a "Who
> is Who" in
> radiation biology perpetuate such 'conclusions' -
> apparently without
> even reading the article let alone looking at the
> data.
> 
> Rainer
> 



+++++++++++++++++++
May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion. 
Dwight D. Eisenhower  

-- John
John Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
e-mail:  crispy_bird at yahoo.com

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