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Provided services

The Karolinska Institutet Biostatistics Core Facility provides

  1. Expertise for the planning, conduct, analysis and interpretation and dissemination of research findings from clinical trials, epidemiologic and population-based studies, experiments in basic research, and other types of studies
  2. Advice and support in the preparation of grant applications
  3. Assistance with setup and management of high-quality databases, perform regular data quality checks, data entry, and data cleaning
  4. Education in the areas of study design, data collection, computerization, and statistical methods


Financial support

Support for collaboration over extended periods of time can be provided by covering part of a biostatistician's time (e.g. 20% for 3 months). Support for occasional consultations with a statistician is determined on an hourly basis.


Authorship

The Karolinska Institutet Biostatistics Core Facility follows the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors policy in matters of authorship. If the statisticians contribute substantially to a paper, they should be listed as co-authors. The international policy stipulates that

"Authorship credit should be based on

  1. substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data
  2. drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content
  3. final approval of the version to be published
  4. agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work

All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed."

How to request service

Please send an email message to biostatcore@ki.se.


Priority

All requests are considered. Priority is given to requests
  1. providing financial support
  2. coming from Stockholm County
  3. received earlier in time


Providing data to the statistician

These items are general guidelines and are not necessary, but they are advisable to make the collaboration more efficient.
  1. You should include the rawest form of the data that you have access to. This ensures that data provenance can be maintained throughout the workflow. Most of the time, efforts to preprocess or "clean" the data for the statistical collaborator are counter-productive.
  2. Columns are variables (weight, blood pressure, price, category, time to failure, etc), rows are observations of those variables (patients, patients at different times, animals, etc). Column names should be descriptive but not too long, and please avoid spaces and special characters (e.g.: "#", "%", "&", ",").
  3. Do not use color/highlight/comments to convey important information or to identify observations that satisfy certain conditions (e.g.: observations that need to be excluded). Instead, create new variables (columns) in the dataset to convey that information.
  4. Each cell should include one value only and this value must be machine readable (i.e., a number, string or letter not a color coding).
  5. If you have any missing values in your data, code them consistently with a single character (e.g., "." or "NA"), or provide the missing value codes separately.
  6. If you have multiple tables, they should each include a column in the table that allows them to be joined or merged. Avoid using multiple worksheets. It's preferable to have one dataset per file.
  7. Do not send personally identifiable information, especially by email.
  8. The data should preferably be in a text-based, delimited format, such as csv. Excel files may be acceptable. Other database formats may be acceptable, please enquire. We cannot accept data in a text editor format, such as in Word.