The Biostatistics Graduates' Perspectives Concerning the Curriculum, the Course Educational Topics, and Its Association with Their Career-related Requirements

Background: The study and revision of postgraduates syllabus are very important aspects to promote the level of effectiveness of postgraduates' educations. Owing to the requirement of syllabus reform, especially when the speed of useful life of information in the world is less than a decade, it is a serious aspect for the educational programmers. Objectives: This study aimed to determine the view of biostatistics graduates on the syllabus of the courses, the achievement of learning aims, job requirements, and understanding their educational problems. Methods: The number of graduates was 245 in the levels of Master of Science (MSc) and PhD of biostatistics from Tehran, Iran, Shahid Beheshti, Tarbiat Modares University of Medical Sciences, and University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences. The participants were graduated from 2011 to 2020. The data were collected by a questionnaire and analyzed using SPSS software. Results: Of PhD and MSc graduates, 48 (57.1%) and 70 (43.5%) participants declared, respectively, that they received the necessary theoretical and practical skills that they needed for their job. Also, clinical trial courses in both MSc and PhD periods were chosen by the graduates as the most significant courses, and one of the most applied courses in job requirements. Furthermore, statistical methods at MSc level and longitudinal data analysis at PhD level were chosen as the next important courses by the graduates, respectively. Conclusions: The findings show that the syllabus meets less than half of the graduates' job requirements, so it is not enough and is necessary to reform the contents of educational programs according to their job requirements.

These are not the effects you are looking for: Causality and the within-/between-person distinction in longitudinal data analysis

In psychological science, researchers often pay particular attention to the distinction between within- and between-person relationships in longitudinal data analysis. Here, we aim to clarify the relationship between the within- and between-person distinction and causal inference, and show that the distinction is informative but does not play a decisive role for causal inference. Our main points are threefold. First, within-person data are not necessary for causal inference; for example, between-person experiments can inform us about (average) causal effects. Second, within-person data are not sufficient for causal inference; for example, time-varying confounders can lead to spurious within-person associations. Finally, despite not being sufficient, within-person data can be tremendously helpful for causal inference. We provide pointers to help readers navigate the more technical literature on longitudinal models, and conclude with a call for more conceptual clarity: Instead of letting statistical models dictate which substantive questions we ask, we should start with well-defined theoretical estimands which in turn determine both study design and data analysis.

Measuring epistemic success of a biodiversity citizen science program: A citation study

This paper offers a comparative evaluation of the scientific impact of a citizen science program in ecology, ‘‘Vigie-Nature”, managed by the French National Museum of Natural History. Vigie-Nature consists of a national network of amateur observatories dedicated to a participative study of biodiversity in France that has been running for the last twenty years. We collected 123 articles published by Vigie-Nature in international peer-reviewed journals between 2007 and 2019, and computed the yearly amount of citations of these articles between 0–12 years post-publication. We then compared this body of citations with the number of yearly citations relative to the ensemble of the articles published in ecology and indexed in the ‘‘Web of Science” data-base. Using a longitudinal data analysis, we could observe that the yearly number of citations of the Vigie-Nature articles is significantly higher than that of the other publications in the same domain. Furthermore, this excess of citations tends to steadily grow over time: Vigie-Nature publications are about 1.5 times more cited 3 years after publication, and 3 times more cited 11 years post-publication. These results suggest that large-scale biodiversity citizen science projects are susceptible to reach a high epistemic impact, when managed in specific ways which need to be clarified through further investigations.