research methodology and statistics

hi friends, not sure how it works in other fields, but in medicine and adjacent scientific fields, preprints are not only a good addition, but a solid model of sharing your final drafts of research papers with the community (and possibly benefitting from it). what are preprints? preprint is a version of your final draft that has been made public, usually by submitting it on a specific portal (biorxiv, medrxiv, researchsquare, preprints.org,...). it is NOT a journal submission/publication, it is NOT a peer review, it CAN NOT be cited in the same way as the peer-reviewed journal-published paper can. (it still can be cited, but with an explicit mention that it is a preprint) why do it? publishing (especially in journals with high impact factor) takes months. literally. from the moment of finishing the draft, till publication, 3-6 months could pass in peer-review, revisions, rejections, etc. preprint helps to: 1) bypass the waiting period…

i personally always struggle with going in depth on extremely mundane topics. for example: -why do we need research? well, that's a no brainer, you may say; we need research to generate new knowledge and to validate the one that already exists. absolutely correct, i will reply. so be it. but then, how do you know how to generate knowledge? you will look at me real weird and say - well, "professor", we have scientific method for that, and yada-yada-yada. very well, i say. this so called scientific method, generates knowledge, sounds great. so the knowledge it generates is real, "true" in the sense? you say: well, not really, as we dont know absolute truth, and we dont even have the capacity to know what absolute truth is, as it is merely a concept created by us to just approximate reality to the extent that our ability to observe and reason…

this group is dedicated to learning, understanding and sharing the knowledge of an extremely vast yet minutely precise art of research and statistics.

let there be light!*

*god, genesis 1:3

hello everyone, my name is alexander dmitriev and i am an ayurveda doctor holding bams and md (ayu) as well as a research fellow in sppu, pune and a who and un collaborator. recently who regional office in turkmenistan asked me to prepare a course for faculties at turkmen medical state university and it really inspired (but also pushed) me to learn and understand research and statistics better from the ground up. in this group i will mainly post what i am learning myself -- explained and "dumbed down" information on research and statistics. due to the nature of my occupation it will be largely related to medicine but as we all know scientific method is universal to every discipline.

forgive me my rambling and you are kindly welcome to read, learn and share more knowledge, all contributors are heavily encouraged to participate as well. regards