A December to Not Remember: Monthly Retractions
We’re going to start publishing notices and synthesis of monthly retractions. Science is fluid, and retractions aren’t a bad thing! It means that either something is not replicable, there are analytic problems, or (in the worst case) fraud has been caught. Let’s keep moving closer to the truth! Click on the gif below to go…
An Introduction to Readiness
Author’s Note: So this is a draft a book chapter that didn’t really go anywhere. I might go back to it at some point, but in the spirit of emptying the archives before rolling into the new year, I’m putting it up here. I wrote this back in June prepping for some work with The…
Journalism and Evaluation: Long lost siblings?
Much of our work here at Dawn Chorus is qualitative. Actually sitting down and talking to people can provide huge amount of data and nuance that gets lost in the numbers of survey. While there are courses in most graduate programs around qualitative methods, I’ve been wondering whether the particular set of skills that journalists…
The Month in Quality Improvement
I’ve recently gotten involved in the ECHO project, which helps to build COVID-19 and improvement capacity in nursing homes across the United States. This recent Axios article shows that this word is very timely. To help build my own improvement capability, I’m gotten back into the QI literature. Using PubTrawlr, I pulled from six of…
The Last Month in Evaluation (with some thoughts on AEA)
It’s been a minute since we took a look at the evaluation literature. There’s a lot of stuff that gets published with no way to comb through it all. Click below to go to PubTrawlr’s recap of the last 30 days of some of the main Evaluation journals. Like it? We plan to offer 30…
The Last Month in Community Psychology
It’s a been a long 30 days. For those of us involved in community-based projects and social justice initiatives, it can be exhausting to just stay on top of the news, let alone the academic research. To help the field out, we are going to be launching a monthly newsletter, The Last Month in Community…
A Ghost of Research Past: Developing a measure for R=MC2
A few years ago, I was involved in a project to develop a readiness measure based in the R=MC2 framework. I developed this model back in grad school, and continued to develop it over the next few years in my dissertation work and with past colleagues at the Wandersman Center. Under the leadership of Maria…
Reading (and understanding) Scientific Articles
So you’ve started using PubTrawlr and you’re ready to dive deeper. You follow some links to the primary source, open then up….and it’s gobbledygook. Take a deep breath. This a very common experience. Articles are not easy to read. This isn’t the latest from Stephen King. There is likely to be a ton of jargon.…
Will QCA ever happen? The Promises of the Dark Carnival.
In Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, a mysterious carnival comes to town and promises to grant the secret desires of the residents…at a price. Researchers have these desires, too. We are searching for the next method, the next data set that will yield wonderful findings and allow us to have an impact on…
Ending the 17-year gap–The Role of PubTrawlr
17 years. Research into the medical and social sciences indicates that it can take up to 17 years before a scientific finding makes its way into regular practice[1],[2],[3],[4],[5] This fact is troubling. There are tens of thousands of academic journals filled with literally millions of great ideas and notable findings. So why aren’t these used?…
Evaluation in Health Services Settings: Reader’s Digest Version
Many years ago when the world was young, Drs. Victoria Scott and Kassy Alia-Ray and I wrote a book chapter on how to approach evaluation in community health improvement. That book chapter had a long and circuitous route to publication. Imagine my surprise when just yesterday, a box showed up with two printed copies. This…
Shhh! It’s a secret.
Have you stumbled across this very short blog post? Well, lucky you! PubTrawlr is now live and in beta testing! Over the next few weeks, we’ll be trying out various features and more or less trying to break the interface and the results. However, that doesn’t have to stop you from using it. In fact,…
