Functions Provided by Biostatistician Collaborators

When other departments, divisions, and centers take part in the biostatistics collaboration plan, they receive a number of benefits to further their research and educational missions:

• Priority work on grant proposals by PhD and MS biostatisticians
• Data analysis for existing non-grant-funded projects
• Study and experimental design for non-grant-funded projects
• Assistance with non-grant-funded manuscripts
• Assistance with journal clubs (methodologic review and in some cases co-leadership)
• Assistance with research conference (e.g., data analysis and pre-conference critique of residents, fellows, and junior faculty members' presentations)
• Teaching short courses in study design and analysis methodology for the group
• K award mentoring that is not funded directly by the grant award

There are many benefits of working with biostatisticians related to study design and data analysis as well as important benefits relating to report writing, data management, and implementing good reproducible research practices.

The ideal process for developing grant proposals is to assemble a research team more than three months before the planned submission date. The biostatisticians on the team will be of most benefit when they are involved before the study or experiment is designed. We have found that having the research team meet every two weeks or so results in the best quality proposal. Planning ahead in this way allows time for two major revisions to the proposal, significantly increasing the likelihood of funding.

In many cases communication among research team members is enhanced when one of the biostatisticians creates a web page to organize all documents, meeting announcements, and e-mail lists related to a proposal or a manuscript. Our collaborative web site http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu has many tools for maintaining and sharing master copies of manuscripts and proposals and for tracking changes to the document.

-- FrankHarrell - 05 Aug 2004