Hi Bianca and everyone,
Am 07.03.19 um 14:03 schrieb Bianca Peterson: > Good day everyone, > > Some of my colleagues are planning to develop a Biostatistics course > to bridge the gap between undergraduate and postgraduate students. > They are planning to develop their material on using SPSS, and I am > trying to convince them to rather use R/RStudio. They are reluctant to > switch, because (1) they have been using SPSS quite some time, (2) > SPSS is "easier" than R, and - r4stats has a post on popularity for several data analysis packages: http://r4stats.com/articles/popularity/ There are some graphs there that are very much in favor of R over SPSS. - Of particular interest: Job offers asking for R vs. job offers asking for SPSS - a not-very-up-to-date trend for publications. However, according to that, SPSS had its peak in 2009 (with SPSS : R ratio somewhere around 10:1). I did a quick comparison for 2018 using the search terms as described in http://r4stats.com/articles/how-to-search-for-data-science-articles/ and the ratio is now about 3 : 2 (75000 SPSS vs. some 50000 for R) - Basically, I haven't had anything to do with SPSS, so I don't know how easy this is in SPSS. But the point that gets most researchers and students very interested in R is when I tell them about reproducible data analysis. - knitr documents and not needing to copy and paste stuff over into Word & Co and tediously checking for typos. - with ease ("just") being sure that you can look up all details on your data analysis if necessary. - the possibilty to re-run without any need to worry whether your re-did everything exactly as before. The reply ususally is that this is something they wish they'd known before: these are points (i.e. the not-so-reproducible workflows) that cause a lot of stress in real world academia. > (3) they don't seem to think that funding might become a problem in > future. - I've been in a field where Matlab was (or still is?) the main data analysis package. I've heard that as well. And I've seen people switching to python or R in a rather abrupt fashion when that premise turned out to be wrong. - Even if their group doesn't run out of funding, the students are likely to work in places where such considerations mean that there won't be SPSS (nor Matlab) > > I came across the "Data Carpentry for Biologists" material in the > discuss list http://datacarpentry.org/semester-biology/ and I'm > looking for something similar specifically for > Biostatistics/Biomedical statistics. > > Any resources or referrals will be greatly appreciated! I'd be happy to give a hand after mid of April :-) I don't know of any online resource I can particularly recommend, but depending on how similar your biomed stats are to my biomed stats I may be able contribute "explanation story lines" on some topics. Best, Claudia > > Kind regards, > Bianca > > Bianca Peterson, Ph.D. Environmental Sciences (Genetics) > Post-doctoral Research Fellow: Pharmaceutics > Potchefstroom Campus > North-West University > South Africa > 2531 > <https://twitter.com/BinxiePeterson?lang=en> > https://www.linkedin.com/in/bianca-peterson-007b5b117/ > <https://www.linkedin.com/in/bianca-peterson-007b5b117/> > https://github.com/BinxiePeterson <https://github.com/BinxiePeterson> > *The Carpentries <https://carpentries.topicbox.com/latest>* / discuss > / see discussions <https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss> + > participants <https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/members> > + delivery options > <https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription> > Permalink > <https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T7aec92fdeda8ec4b-Meb1f4b1ce6c1e7593be3691e> > -- Claudia Beleites Chemometric Consulting Södeler Weg 19 61200 Wölfersheim Germany phone: +49 (15 23) 1 83 74 18 e-mail: [email protected] USt-ID: DE305606151 ------------------------------------------ The Carpentries: discuss Permalink: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T7aec92fdeda8ec4b-M7356ed3ddf9ceacfcd4ed027 Delivery options: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription
