Data

“ Tinkering around with the data, also known as exploratory data analysis, is often the most informative part of the analysis. Exploratory plots can reveal data quality issues and outliers. Simple summaries, such as means, standard deviations, and quantiles, can help refine thinking and offer face validity checks for hypotheses. Many studies, especially when going in completely new scientific directions, are exploratory by design; the area may be too novel to include clear a priori hypotheses. Working with the data informally can help generate new hypotheses and ideas. ”

“ Data papers should describe in detail how the data was acquired, with which goals and constraints, an assessment of their quality, how they have and how they can or should be reused, how to get access, give feedback and credit. Datasets are technical and critical building blocks of science and should be recognized as such by high impact and heavy citation, ensuring that creators of data are appropriately acknowledged for their work. ”

“ We have refrained from using this concept throughout this discussion, but at this point it is appropriate to recognize that some informatics literature describes the informatics continuum (earlier referred to as the data progression) as data to information to knowledge to wisdom. [26] Typically, finding objective measures of wisdom is not easy or universally accepted. However, we have chosen to substitute wisdom for decision and outcomes. As a result, our data progression extends to the following sequence: data to information to knowledge to decisions to outcomes. ”

“ Still, there are generally certain surviving data, in place-names, natural features, and so forth, which enable those who can detect them, and make use of them, to piece together something like a connected outline of what we may take, with some degree of probability, as an approximation to what have been actual facts, although lacking, at the time, the chronicler to record them. ”

“ Whether your data can be suitably represented by a stem and leaf display depends on whether they can be rounded without loss of important information. Also, their extreme values must fit into two successive digits, as the data in Figure 5 fit into the 10,000 and 100,000 places (for leaves and stems, respectively) . Deciding what kind of graph is best suited to displaying your data thus requires good judgment. Statistics is not just recipes! ”

“ Future work Future work could improve on these results by considering and integrating all methods of data use attribution. This holistic effort would include identifying citations to the paper that describes the data collection, mentions of the dataset identifier itself – whether in full text, the references section, or supplementary information – citations to the dataset as a first-class research object, and even mentions of the data collection investigators in acknowledgement sections. ”

“ Rule 1. Love Your Data, and Help Others Love It, Too Data management is a repeat-play game. If you take care to make your data easily available to others, others are more likely to do the same—eventually. ”

“ As data, though entitled to a certain limited respect, they cannot be placed on a level with the facts of sense or the laws of logic. The kind of respect which they deserve seems to me such as to warrant us in hoping, though not too confidently, that the hard data may prove them to be at least probable. Also, if the hard data are found to throw no light whatever upon their truth or falsehood, we are justified, I think, in giving rather more weight to the hypothesis of their truth than to the hypothesis of their falsehood. ”

“ Statistics on family in the USA and the world are a matter of public record. The processing and interpretation of data, even in the age of electronic processing, takes time once data has been collected. ”

“ Asking questions at the design stage can save headaches at the analysis stage: careful data collection can greatly simplify analysis and make it more rigorous. Or, as Sir Ronald Fisher put it: “To consult the statistician after an experiment is finished is often merely to ask him to conduct a post mortem examination. ”

“ In short, the more extended collection of economic data is now rendered possible by the better methods employed in census and statistical bureaus, and the resort to the work of verification of economic principles by the examination of these data is the one thing only which can redeem political economy from the baseless and common charge of being a set of impractical formulæ. ”

“ Simple inspection of the data enables us to perceive them; and one inspection is as effective as a million for engendering in us the conviction that between those data that relation must always hold. To change the relation we should have to make the data different. 'The guarantee for the uniformity and adequacy' of the data can only be the mind's own power to fix upon any objective content, and to mean that content as often as it likes. ”

“ The attempt to make comparison between the percentage of growth of population and the percentage of growth in the expenditures of the Federal Government, using no facts relative to the great increase in mechanical production and of wealth, is a vicious use of statistical data. Such showings are the results of the work of the statistical mechanic, the man who constructs statistical tables to order.
Statistics really take the place of observation. ”

“ Note that many research sponsors define data broadly to include physical collections, software and code, and curriculum materials.# Sources. Data may come from direct human observation, laboratory and field instruments, experiments, simulations, and compilations of data from other studies. Reviewers and sponsors may be particularly interested in understanding if data are proprietary, are being compiled from other studies, pertain to human subjects, or are otherwise subject to restrictions in their use or redistribution.# Volume. ”

“ Every article on statistics requires at least one caveat. Here is ours: we refer in this article to “science” as a convenient shorthand for investigations using data to study questions of interest. This includes social science, engineering, digital humanities, finance, and so on. Statisticians are not shy about reminding administrators that statistical science has an impact on nearly every part of almost all organizations. ”

“ We do not know, except by means of more or less precarious inferences, whether the objects which are at one time sense-data continue to exist at times when they are not data. Sense-data at the times when they are data are all that we directly and primitively know of the external world; hence in epistemology the fact that they are data is all-important. ”

“ Thus it is the fact that different people have similar sense-data, and that one person in a given place at different times has similar sense-data, which makes us suppose that over and above the sense-data there is a permanent public object which underlies or causes the sense-data of various people and various times. ”

“ We’ve been making statistical reports on society for two centuries. We have immense files of data. The machines are able to predict what each person and group will do at a given time, in a given situation. ”

“ Introduction Data is the central currency of science, but the nature of scientific data has changed dramatically with the rapid pace of technology. This change has led to the development of a wide variety of data formats, dataset sizes, data complexity, data use cases, and data sharing practices. ”

“ Worry about Data Quality Well-trained experimenters understand instinctively that, when it comes to data analysis, “garbage in produces garbage out.” However, the complexity of modern data collection requires many assumptions about the function of technology, often including data pre-processing technology. ”

“ Such plans typically cover all or portions of the data life cycle—from data discovery, collection, and organization (e.g., spreadsheets, databases) , through quality assurance/quality control, documentation (e.g., data types, laboratory methods) and use of the data, to data preservation and sharing with others (e.g., data policies and dissemination approaches) . Fig 1 illustrates the relationship between hypothetical research and data life cycles and highlights the links to the rules presented in this paper. The DMP undergoes peer review and is used in part to evaluate a project’s merit. ”

“ The more the data created by your colleagues is accessible as an organized collection of some sort, the better your community's research capacity. The more data get shared, used, and cited, the more they improve. Besides personal involvement and encouragement, the best way to reward data sharing is by attribution: always cite the sources of data that you use. Follow good scientific practice and give credit to those whose data you use, following their preferred reference format and according to current best practices. ”

“ Experienced reviewers will be on the lookout for unfunded components, but they will also recognize that greater or lesser investments in data management depend upon the nature of the research and the types of data. ”

“ A procession of the damned.
By the damned, I mean the excluded.
We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.
Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed, will march. You'll read them—or they'll march. ”

“ A central and common task for us as research investigators is to decipher what our data are able to say about the problems we are trying to solve. Statistics is a language constructed to assist this process, with probability as its grammar. While rudimentary conversations are possible without good command of the language (and are conducted routinely) , principled statistical analysis is critical in grappling with many subtle phenomena to ensure that nothing serious will be lost in translation and to increase the likelihood that your research findings will stand the test of time. ”

“ In statistics, it is evident that empirical laws may sometimes be traced; and the tracing them forms an important part of that system of indirect observation on which we must often rely for the data of the Deductive Science. ”

“ A data management plan should provide you and others with an easy-to-follow road map that will guide and explain how data are treated throughout the life of the project and after the project is completed. The ten simple rules presented here are designed to aid you in writing a good plan that is logical and comprehensive, that will pass muster with reviewers and research sponsors, and that you can put into practice should your project be funded. ”

“ Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship, which grinds you stuff of any degree of fineness; but, nevertheless, what you get out depends upon what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat-flour from peascods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data. ”

“ Also we must remember that the distinction of hard and soft data is psychological and subjective, so that, if there are other minds than our own—which at our present stage must be held doubtful—the catalogue of hard data may be different for them from what it is for us. ”

“ Conscious effort to promote uniform treatment of statistical data, a theme which has been discussed almost to weariness by the National Education Association and kindred organizations, has been singularly fruitless. ”

“ Building upon this work, we suggest several possible sources for an “Open Data citation benefit”:
Data Reuse. Papers with available datasets can be used in ways that papers without data cannot, and may receive additional citations as a result. Credibility Signalling. The credibility of research findings may be higher for research papers with available data. Such papers may be preferentially chosen as background citations or the foundation of additional research. Increased Visibility. ”

“ Importantly, almost all of these mechanisms are aligned with more efficient and effective scientific progress: increased data use, facilitated credibility determination, earlier access, improved discoverability, and a focus on best work through data availability are good for both investigators and the science community as a whole. ”

“ To predetermine a rate and then to expect it without supervision to work out to a successful conclusion is, to say the least, foolish. Only by means of a complete record of life histories can a mass of reliable data be built up which can be made to serve as a guide for the future. ”

“ If an observer is clever, then, he can use a series of measurements on part of his data-set to ground a guess about a pattern that holds in that data set, and then use that pattern to ground a guess about the values of unmeasured parts of the data set. ”

“ Why do we hear so much of the "approximate correctness" of so many statistical tables, when, in point of fact, the primary data are incapable of proof, and the averages and conclusions built upon them are all assumed? "Statisticians," says one of the fraternity, "are generally held to be eminently practical people; on the contrary, they are more given to theorizing than any other class of writers ”

“ I examine the data, as an expert, and pronounce a specialist’s opinion. I claim no credit in such cases. My name figures in no newspaper. The work itself, the pleasure of finding a field for my peculiar powers, is my highest reward. ”

“ The statistician must approach this problem as the astronomer does in calculating the complete orbit of a comet, that is, he must construct his curve from a limited number of specific data. If we study the curve of growth of population in this country, we find that we have long since passed the most rapid rate of increase. ”

“ There is in fact a certain regularity or conformity to law about the occurrence of sense-data, but the sense-data that occur at one time are often causally connected with those that occur at quite other times, and not, or at least not very closely, with those that occur at neighbouring times. ”