A recent Perspective in Nature issued a call for more transparency in the reporting of preclinical research (1). Although this article focused primarily on experimental design, it emphasized the need for improved reporting in the scientific literature. Within the context of preclinical studies, there have been discussions regarding the appropriate reporting of standard error (SE) and standard d...

Normatively, a statistical pairwise comparison is a function of the mean, standard deviation (SD), and sample size of the data. In our experiment, 203 undergraduates compared product pairs and judged their confidence thatone product was better than the other. We experimentally manipulated (within subjects) theaverage productratings, the number of raters (sample size), and the SD of the ratings....

BACKGROUND External pilot or feasibility studies can be used to estimate key unknown parameters to inform the design of the definitive randomised controlled trial (RCT). However, there is little consensus on how large pilot studies need to be, and some suggest inflating estimates to adjust for the lack of precision when planning the definitive RCT. METHODS We use a simulation approach to illu...

We aimed to examine the extent to which inaccurate assumptions for nuisance parameters used to calculate sample size can affect the power of a randomized controlled trial (RCT). In a simulation study, we separately considered an RCT with continuous, dichotomous or time-to-event outcomes, with associated nuisance parameters of standard deviation, success rate in the control group and survival ra...

In this paper, the distributional properties and power rates of the Lz, Eci2z, and Eci4z statistics when they are used as item fit statistics were explored. The results were compared to t-transformation of Outfit and Infit mean square. Four sample sizes were selected: 100, 250, 500, and 1000 examinees. The abilities were uniform and normal with mean 0 and standard deviation 1, and uniform and n...

BACKGROUND When using the change-in-estimate criterion, a cutoff of 10% is commonly used to identify confounders. However, the appropriateness of this cutoff has never been evaluated. This study investigated cutoffs required under different conditions. METHODS Four simulations were performed to select cutoffs that achieved a significance level of 5% and a power of 80%, using linear regression...

Meta-analyses are increasingly used for synthesis of evidence from biomedical research, and often include an assessment of publication bias based on visual or analytical detection of asymmetry in funnel plots. We studied the influence of different normalisation approaches, sample size and intervention effects on funnel plot asymmetry, using empirical datasets and illustrative simulations. We fo...