andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1491 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: A few years ago I noted the following quote from applied microeconomist Steven Levitt: Is it surprising that scientists would try to keep work that disagrees with their findings out of journals? When I told my father that I [Levitt] was sending my work saying car seats are not that effective to medical journals, he laughed and said they would never publish it because of the result, no matter how well done the analysis was. (As is so often the case, he was right, and I eventually published it in an economics journal.) Within the field of economics, academics work behind the scenes constantly trying to undermine each other. I’ve seen economists do far worse things than pulling tricks in figures. When economists get mixed up in public policy, things get messier. At the time, I expressed dismay about Levitt’s air of (as I read it) amused, world-weary tolerance of scientists behaving against the interest of science. But I took his story about the car seats at face value. But no
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 A few years ago I noted the following quote from applied microeconomist Steven Levitt: Is it surprising that scientists would try to keep work that disagrees with their findings out of journals? [sent-1, score-0.13]
2 When I told my father that I [Levitt] was sending my work saying car seats are not that effective to medical journals, he laughed and said they would never publish it because of the result, no matter how well done the analysis was. [sent-2, score-0.793]
3 ) Within the field of economics, academics work behind the scenes constantly trying to undermine each other. [sent-4, score-0.115]
4 I’ve seen economists do far worse things than pulling tricks in figures. [sent-5, score-0.061]
5 When economists get mixed up in public policy, things get messier. [sent-6, score-0.061]
6 At the time, I expressed dismay about Levitt’s air of (as I read it) amused, world-weary tolerance of scientists behaving against the interest of science. [sent-7, score-0.188]
7 But I took his story about the car seats at face value. [sent-8, score-0.434]
8 But now I’m not so sure about the car seats story. [sent-9, score-0.434]
9 The other research teams found a protective effect of child car seats, but Doyle and Levitt did not. [sent-11, score-0.382]
10 Well, the complete interview data is a hint as to what could be happening differently. [sent-13, score-0.065]
11 It is very hard to publish a paper in medical journal using weaker data than that present elsewhere. [sent-14, score-0.339]
12 as a reference, but still claim that they are the first to consider this issue: This study provides the first analysis of the relative effectiveness of seat belts and child safety seats in preventing injury based on representative samples of police-reported crash data. [sent-21, score-0.721]
13 So now let us consider reasons that a medical journal may have had issues with this paper. [sent-22, score-0.202]
14 Second, it doesn’t explain why crash testing results do not seem to translate into actual reduction in events. [sent-24, score-0.102]
15 It might be due to misuse of the equipment, but it is not clear to me what the conclusion should be then. [sent-25, score-0.059]
16 Delaney concludes: So is the explanation Levitt’s father gave possible? [sent-26, score-0.103]
17 Medical journals are used to seeing experiments (randomized controlled drug trials, for example) overturn otherwise compelling observational data. [sent-29, score-0.098]
18 So it isn’t a mystery why the paper had trouble with reviewers and it does not require any conspiracy theories about public health researchers not being open to new ideas or to data. [sent-30, score-0.192]
19 Ideally, Levitt and Doyle would collaborate with experts in traffic safety and epidemiology; this might give them a better sense of the research and data in this area. [sent-32, score-0.095]
20 In this case, I wonder what would’ve happened if Doyle and Levitt, before submitting their paper to a journal, had sat around a table with Michael Elliott and Kristy Arbogast and tried to understand how their estimates differed. [sent-34, score-0.075]
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