Related papers: Contra-Analysis: Prioritizing Meaningful Effect Si…
In previous papers it was demonstrated that lower performance groups have a larger size-dependent cumulative advantage for receiving citations than top-performance groups. Furthermore, regardless of performance, larger groups have less…
[See paper for full abstract] Meta-analysis is a crucial tool for answering scientific questions. It is usually conducted on a relatively small amount of ``trusted'' data -- ideally from randomized, controlled trials -- which allow causal…
Experimental comparisons of performance represent an important aspect of research on optimization algorithms. In this work we present a methodology for defining the required sample sizes for designing experiments with desired statistical…
In this paper, a Bayesian approach is developed for simultaneously comparing multiple experimental treatments with a common control treatment in an exploratory clinical trial. The sample size is set to ensure that, at the end of the study,…
We describe and contrast two distinct problem areas for statistical causality: studying the likely effects of an intervention ("effects of causes"), and studying whether there is a causal link between the observed exposure and outcome in an…
Marginal structural models fit via inverse probability of treatment weighting are commonly used to control for confounding when estimating causal effects from observational data. When planning a study that will be analyzed with marginal…
The best empirical research in political science clearly defines substantive parameters of interest, presents a set of assumptions that guarantee its identification, and uses an appropriate estimator. We argue for the importance of…
Conjoint experiments have become central to survey research in political science and related fields because they allow researchers to study preferences across multiple attributes simultaneously. Beyond estimating main effects, scholars…
Estimation of social influence in networks can be substantially biased in observational studies due to homophily and network correlation in exposure to exogenous events. Randomized experiments, in which the researcher intervenes in the…
Effect modification means the magnitude or stability of a treatment effect varies as a function of an observed covariate. Generally, larger and more stable treatment effects are insensitive to larger biases from unmeasured covariates, so a…
The era of big data is coming, and evidence-based medicine is attracting increasing attention to improve decision making in medical practice via integrating evidence from well designed and conducted clinical research. Meta-analysis is a…
Scholarly article impact reflects the significance of academic output recognised by academic peers, and it often plays a crucial role in assessing the scientific achievements of researchers, teams, institutions and countries. It is also…
Scientists pursue collective knowledge, but they also seek personal recognition from their peers. When scientists decide whether or not to work on a big new problem, they weigh the potential rewards of a major discovery against the costs of…
Contemporary scientific research is a distributed, collaborative endeavor, carried out by teams of researchers, regulatory institutions, funding agencies, commercial partners, and scientific bodies, all interacting with each other and…
Building interpretable parameterizations of real-world decision-making on the basis of demonstrated behavior -- i.e. trajectories of observations and actions made by an expert maximizing some unknown reward function -- is essential for…
Across domains such as medicine, employment, and criminal justice, predictive models often target labels that imperfectly reflect the outcomes of interest to experts and policymakers. For example, clinical risk assessments deployed to…
The selection of the assumed effect size (AES) critically determines the duration of an experiment, and hence its accuracy and efficiency. Traditionally, experimenters determine AES based on domain knowledge. However, this method becomes…
Sequential Multiple-Assignment Randomized Trials (SMARTs) play an increasingly important role in psychological and behavioral health research. This experimental approach enables researchers to answer scientific questions about how to…
The design of research grants has been hypothesized to be a useful tool for influencing researchers and their science. We test this by conducting two thought experiments in a nationally representative survey of academic researchers. First,…
Evidence for Action (E4A), a signature program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, funds investigator-initiated research on the impacts of social programs and policies on population health and health inequities. Across thousands of…