Journals usually have a requirement for alpha so this plays a big role. Also, where alpha is set depends on the consequences of getting a wrong answer. For example, if you’re testing a new drug you’d probably want to set alpha at 0.01 because if you found an effect you’d want to make sure that it wasn’t due to chance.

On the other hand, with most research you don’t want to miss an effect if it is there so you can afford to set alpha a little higher. Generally speaking, if you set alpha above 0.05 it likely means that you weren’t able to see an effect so you’ve adjusted alpha afterwards so you can say that your results are statisitically significant. Most people “in the know” will pick up on this rather quickly though.

One question i have is this. How/Who/What decides alpha? Why do the authors pick .05 verus .01? Do they even get a say or is the journal/publisher the one doing that? This is deep stuff man and i like hearing about it

@ Jeff – I never really thought about that given that I’ve always had access to great libraries. Honestly, I think the prices per article are just plain ridiculous if you don’t have a subscription (which are always overpriced). If they reduced the cost I’ll bet that they’d sell a whole lot more individual papers.

Yes…if they live in large urban centers.

I also cannot confirm this but I would hazard a guess that smaller universities without medical or rehabilitation programs may not carry the same subscriptions as Mac or U of T…

Lastly, for those of us who work in the clinical setting Monday to Friday…AND…in a rural area, getting to a major university would be difficult to do. (This also applies to those in the gym setting, etc).

Obviously we live in an electronic age and fortunately I have access via something that starts with “pass” and ends with “words”. I was lucky for the last 12 years in undergrad, chiro school, and grad school…now,…different story. Being a member to every single association and subscribing to all others just isn’t feasible.

I have abstracts coming into my inbox all the time and I don’t mind searching for them. But on occasion I’ll hit a journal that I don’t have access to.

Anyway…I may be completely wrong…

@ Rhett – When I was in grad school I had to read and review AT LEAST 10 journal articles per week. When you have to do this for a couple years you get pretty good at it. At first it took me hours to read a single study in detail, but over time I got much faster. It really is a skill to be learned. I probably put in at least 5 hours per month reading journals, but I can cover a lot of material in that time.

These days journal articles just seem to appear in my inbox. Friends are always sending stuff my way that they think I’ll be interested in. I also subscribe to email alerts from many journals that send me the table of contents each time a new issue comes out and I can look into the articles that sound interesting. If I’m searching Pubmed I just tend to come up with a theme that I’m interested in for a while and focus on that. However, I rarely reach beyond my scope of understanding. If I don’t understand the methods that means I don’t understand the assumptions associated with those methods and I could easily make a mistake.

Truthfully, I’ve given some thought to doing something like Alan Aragon’s Research Review, but specifically geared towards training for hypertrophy, performance, and strength, and rehab, but I’m not sure what the interest would be like.

@ Jeff – Why do you think the information is not accessible? Anyone can usually get their hands on it at a university library can’t they?

Too bad opinions being formed from abstracts are far too common. I know you both feel the same way as I do and would NEVER dare think about doing so. This is just something you do not do. PERIOD.

I agree with you Mike that I, too, would like to see more negative, or lack of significance, studies published…come to think of it, my study actually trended this way (in large part due to the wrong subject population utilized).

Overall, in my opinion, the biggest issue is lack of access to scholarly research…

Anyway, good job boys.

How much time would you say you spend reading journals, and what type of process goes into what you decided to pick out and read in full (or is it whatever strikes your fancy in any given week?)

As someone with a very modest scientific background, I often find myself stuck in between…………..I don’t want to have to read a bunch of studies just to determine if something is the best way to do things according to current knowledge, but on the other hand, I don’t want to be the guy who ignores science completely or merely skims a few abstracts or reads things in such a way as to get a very incomplete picture of what is going on.

It would be interesting to see how people like you wade through what is out there. On the nutritional front, you have guys like Alan Aragon, Lyle McDonald, and Martin Berkhan who always seem to be on top of things, almost to the point of appearing to live on Pubmed (at least to a novice like me, that is), but they don’t strike me as the type who do nothing but whole up and read studies 23 hours out of the day, either. So it has always interested me to know how guys who stay very current with what is going on manage to find time to live life, work, have a bit of down time, and still stay up to date with research in a given area.

I like the review and they are all important things to take into account!

I wish more negative studies were published though. It is just as important to know what does NOT work. I think they were going to actually start at Journal of Negative Results or something similar. Granted, if you are the top publisher in that journal you are committing academic suicide.

While having a high rejection rate is ok, at times it gets to be crazy with the revisions you have to do. Many top journals pride themselves on their rejection rate too.

True, training studies on athletes are very rare. If I was a college coach and a grad student asked me to study my athletes I would say hell no!

The average college kid is much easier to get into a study, but not as easy as you may think. The studies I ran went great (thanks to my wonderful volunteers–seriously, they were great), but I have heard of horror stories. If half of your subjects drop out at the end of the study, you are screwed. Sometimes even just a few dropping out = massive headaches, esp if you have to go back and plead to the IRB why you need more people now.

Funding is always a tricky one. Some times the supplement company will actually OWN the data and if you as a PI don’t state that no matter the results you are going to publish it; the odds of it seeing the light of day are slim.

I agree that most grad student’s don’t give two stick’s shake about who funded it. Many times they don’t even control the study design.

I opted to do a study in the lab with current equipment and then pay for the energy drinks out of my own pocket vs try to contact the energy drink companies. I wanted to make sure that it may cost me more money, but less hassle. Although, Red Bull has sponsored quite a few studies (I used Monster Energy drink though)

Off my soapbox I go.
Rock on
Mike T Nelson PhD(c)
http://ExtremeHumanPerformance.com