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Data on $K spend on neurodevelopmental disorder research by NIH: from Bishop, D. V. M. (2010). Which neurodevelopmental disorders get researched and why? PLOS One, 5(11), e15112. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0015112 Every year I hear from students interested in doing postgraduate study with me at Oxford. Most of them express a strong research interest in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). At one level, this is not surprising: if you want to work on autism and you look at the University website, you will find me as one of the people listed as affiliated with the Oxford Autism Research Centre. But if you look at my publication list, you find that autism research is a rather minor part of what I do: 13% of my papers have autism as a keyword, and only 6% have autism or ASD in the title. And where I have published on autism, it is usually in the context of comparing language in ASD with developmental language disorder (DLD, aka specific language impairment, SLI). And, indeed in the publication r...

Together with some colleagues, I am carrying out an analysis of methodological issues such as statistical power in papers in top neuroscience journals. Our focus is on papers that compare brain and/or behaviour measures in people who vary on common genetic variants. I'm learning a lot by being forced to read research outside my area, but I'm struck by how difficult many of these papers are to follow. I'm neither a statistician nor a geneticist, but I have nodding acquaintance with both disciplines, as well as with neuroscience, yet in many cases I find myself struggling to make sense of what researchers did and what they found. Some papers that have taken hours of reading and re-reading to just get at the key information that we are seeking for our analysis, i.e. what was the largest association that was reported. This is worrying for the field, because the number of people competent to review such papers will be extremely small. Good editors will, of course, try to cover a...