Journal club: STEP 4 and what a withdrawal design can prove — one year on

A conflict-of-interest statement is worth reading aloud and is worth very little as a predictor. Design quality is what to spend the session on.

I have kept the units in throughout, for the obvious reason.

Post #5 and I disagree about the size of the effect, not about the direction.

Reading order that works for these sessions: registry entry, methods, baseline table, primary result, then abstract last. Reading the abstract first anchors everything that follows.

Coming back to post #25, because the follow-up matters more than the original answer.

Nobody has said the unglamorous part of STEP 4 yet, so: most of the variation is explained by things that are boring to write about and easy to check.

Quietly grateful for the plain phrasing. Not every thread gets that.

My understanding of STEP 4 is a few years old and may have been superseded. If it has been, I would genuinely like to know rather than keep repeating it.

The summary that goes to the digest should say what the paper establishes, what it does not, and one thing the group could not settle. Three paragraphs, no more.

The variance between people here is larger than the effect being discussed.

Two sentences on STEP 4 and then I will stop, because the rest is speculation and the thread is better without mine.

What is documented is narrow. What is inferred from it is broad. The gap between them is where every argument here lives.

The most common failure mode is spending fifty minutes on the effect size and ten on the population. Reversing that ratio would improve most sessions.

Post #61 is the version of this I will quote in future. One addition.

Reframing STEP 4 slightly, because I think the disagreement is about the question rather than the answer. If the question is "does it happen", yes. If it is "how often", nobody here knows.