jsalvatier comments on LessWrong Help Desk - free paper downloads and more (2014) - Less Wrong

30 Post author: jsalvatier 16 January 2014 05:51AM

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Comment author: VincentYu 26 January 2014 10:32:28PM *  7 points [-]

Here.

Does anyone know if Cochrane publishes the data they use in their meta analysis?

I had a look. It turns out Cochrane does publish all their usable data, and they seem to be ungated! Here's a link to the data for this meta-analysis. (The link to this data is provided in the gated HTML article, but there doesn't seem to be a link from an ungated page, so I wonder if these data are supposed to be freely accessible... In any case, all their data are currently ungated and accessible by appending '/downloadstats' to the appropriate URL.)

Comment author: jsalvatier 30 January 2014 08:16:27PM *  3 points [-]

Here are some details about the file formats: http://tech.cochrane.org/revman/documentation/file-formats

I find myself irritated that they only include effect sizes and sample sizes rather than the actual observed counts for each group, as that would make a Bayesian analysis much easier.

Comment author: gwern 30 January 2014 09:20:44PM 3 points [-]

I haven't looked in detail at it, but is that because their formats or approaches do not support raw data or because they do support raw counts but simply did not supply them? ie they had the data & discarded it, or they may never have had the observed counts & were going off effect sizes reported in papers; the latter is plausible as I've found authors very unwilling to share detailed information beyond what is reported in papers.

Comment author: jsalvatier 31 January 2014 03:33:36AM *  4 points [-]

Turns out they actually, do report it! It was just under an unexpected label "EVENTS_1". I'm going to do a meta analysis of my own.

Comment author: gwern 31 January 2014 04:43:08PM *  2 points [-]