Journal club: what we got wrong in an earlier session

On the subject in the title: Journal club: what we got wrong in an earlier session Working notes rather than a conclusion.

Bringing a claim rather than a paper, because the claim is the thing circulating.

The statement gets made confidently and cites SURMOUNT-1 (N Engl J Med, 2022) when pressed. I have read the trial and I cannot find the sentence it is supposed to rest on.

Either I am reading the wrong section or the claim has drifted from the source. I would like to know which before I repeat the correction anywhere.

Sessions on negative or null results are consistently the most instructive and the hardest to get anyone to attend.

Building on post #2 rather than restating it.

The baseline characteristics table is the single most useful page for the questions that get asked here, because it tells you who the result applies to.

Not disagreeing with anyone above, just adding the bit I keep having to look up.

Grateful for the specificity. Vague answers to this question are what sent me looking.

The most common failure mode is spending fifty minutes on the effect size and ten on the population. Reversing that ratio would improve most sessions.

Answering the question post #5 raises rather than the one it answers.

A conflict-of-interest statement is worth reading aloud and is worth very little as a predictor. Design quality is what to spend the session on.

I have kept the units in throughout, for the obvious reason.

Reading a preprint in a session is fine provided the status is stated in the first minute and stays in the summary.

That is a description of practice, not a recommendation of it.

Reading order that works for these sessions: registry entry, methods, baseline table, primary result, then abstract last. Reading the abstract first anchors everything that follows.

Sensible. I would want the same detail before I acted on it either.

Post #8 describes the usual case. This is about the unusual one.

Where the group cannot agree, record the disagreement rather than resolving it by seniority. The recorded disagreement is more honest and more useful later.

Posting it because the silence on this was starting to look like agreement.

Post #7 describes the usual case. This is about the unusual one.

Bringing the previous paper on the same question makes the session much better and doubles the preparation. Worth doing every third session rather than every one.

The figures usually contain the finding and the text usually contains the interpretation. Separating them for the first twenty minutes is a discipline worth keeping.

Where the group cannot agree, record the disagreement rather than resolving it by seniority. The recorded disagreement is more honest and more useful later.

I would put this at better than even and not much better.

The baseline characteristics table is the single most useful page for the questions that get asked here, because it tells you who the result applies to.

Old habit: I write down the expected answer before I calculate it.