DataSharing

what-to-expect-from-the-analyst

When you turn over a properly tidied data set it dramatically decreases the workload on the statistician. So hopefully they will get back to you much sooner. But most careful statisticians will check your recipe, ask questions about steps you performed, and try to confirm that they can obtain the same tidy data that you did with, at minimum, spot checks.

You should then expect from the statistician:

1. An analysis script that performs each of the analyses (not just instructions)
2. The exact computer code they used to run the analysis
3. All output files/figures they generated.

This is the information you will use in the supplement to establish reproducibility and precision of your results. Each of the steps in the analysis should be clearly explained and you should ask questions when you don’t understand what the analyst did. It is the responsibility of both the statistician and the scientist to understand the statistical analysis. You may not be able to perform the exact analyses without the statistician’s code, but you should be able to explain why the statistician performed each step to a labmate/your principal investigator.