At the second annual Motor Impairment Program meeting held at Neuroscience Research Australia at the end of last year, we were lucky to have guest speaker, Professor David Vaux from the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research (Melbourne, Australia) come up to talk to us about some general problems that research is currently facing.
STATISTICS!
One of these problems came to light when Professor David Vaux tried to interpret figures from important, ground-breaking publications in the journal Nature. He came to a shocking discovery: it was often not stated in the journal articles what the error bars represent. So he asked himself, how could reviewers and editors have accepted these articles in this world-leading journal without even knowing what the figures and graphs mean? Watch this video for his thoughts.
PUBLICATION:
Why I retracted my Nature paper: A guest post from David Vaux about correcting the scientific record.
Vaux, DL (2012). Research methods: Know when your numbers are significant, Nature 492: 180-181.
Cumming G, Fidler F and Vaux DL (2007). Error bars in experimental biology, Journal of Cell Biology 177: 7-11.