It’s #overlyhonestmethods come to life!

Retraction Watch reports a study of microarray data sharing. The article, published in Clinical Chemistry, is itself behind a paywall despite trumpeting the virtues of open data. So straight to the Open Access Irony Award group at CiteULike it goes. I was not surprised to learn that the rate of public deposition of data is low, nor that most deposited data ignores standards and much of it is low quality. What did catch my eye though, was a retraction notice for one of the articles from the study, in which the authors explain the reason for retraction. Two phrases in particular stand out: we discovered an error in the data fed into the software This decision was based on the instructions from the software during the initial data feed process The language used strongly suggests a process whereby data was blindly “fed” into software, with little or no understanding of either how the software worked or the statistical methods employed. To quote Bill in our Twitter discussion: @neilfws "decision was based on the instructions from the software" What the…? It's #overlyhonestmethods come to life!— Bill Hooker (@sennoma) January 30, 2013 If you are in this situation, seek help. Talk to a friendly local statistician. Or if there isn’t one, do your research on the Web before publishing. At the very least, try to ensure that what you’re doing corresponds broadly with what most other people in the field would consider “best pr...
Source: What You're Doing Is Rather Desperate - Category: Bioinformaticians Authors: Tags: bioinformatics publications statistics microarray reproducibility retraction Source Type: blogs