Last week our latest joint effort saw the light in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Together with colleagues from around the globe we aim to publish a series of editorials addressing specific issues in research methodology that impact the conduct, presentation and interpretation of sports and exercise medicine studies. This effort and it's goals are outlined in an editorial published by the BJSM last week.
Verhagen E, Stovitz SD, Mansournia MA, Nielsen RO, Shrier I. BJSM educational editorials: methods matter. Br J Sports Med. 2017;bjsports–2017–097998.
Advancing the quality of research in the field of sports and exercise medicine is a BJSM aim. Therefore, BJSM publishes papers with a methodological focus, helping readers to better understand and interpret study outcomes. This has assisted our community to translate study outcomes into practice. The state of the art in research methods is, however, continuously evolving and methodological papers advance the field of epidemiology and biostatistics. Just as our community adapts to advances in physiotherapy, imaging and sports science, we must embrace statistical method advances to ensure that shared decisions with athletes are based on accurate information.
With a series of editorials on biostatistical and epidemiological methods, we aim to empower the sports and exercise medicine professional to be able to critically evaluate how methodological choices influenced the research results they read. Ultimately we hope this leads to better use of evidence in a practical context.
This 'baseline' editorial is not the first in the series, and if you are interested in what our collaboration already harvested, be sure to check out the following pieces as well. Also, please take note that Authorship is open and see this as a call for your submissions too.
- Stovitz SD, Verhagen E, Shrier I. Misinterpretations of the ’p value’: a brief primer for academic sports medicine. Br J Sports Med 2017;51:1176–7.
- Nielsen RO, Bertelsen ML, Møller M, Hulme A, Windt J, Verhagen E, et al. Training load and structure-specific load: applications for sport injury causality and data analyses. Br J Sports Med. 2017 Jul 24.
- Nielsen RO, Bertelsen ML, Verhagen E, Mansournia MA, Hulme A, Møller M, et al. When is a study result important for athletes, clinicians and team coaches/staff? Br J Sports Med. 2017 May 16;:bjsports–2017–097759.
- Shrier I, Clarsen B, Verhagen E, Gordon K, Mellette J. Improving the accuracy of sports medicine surveillance: when is a subsequent event a new injury? Br J Sports Med. 2017 Jan;51(1):26–8.