Let’s have a basic understanding of eachother’s expectations. I am one person, and I don’t have any employees. I also have a day job. I will work on your projects mostly during the weekends or when I don’t have anything else to do. I graduated medicine and I’m an epidemiologist now. I am neither a computer scientist, nor a data engineer, nor anything in between. I learned some statistics for fun.

What to expect from me

• I don’t know everything, especially about your subject.
• I take no responsibility for errors and typos in your data.
• There may be outliers and trange values. I may not notice them or not know what to do with them.
• I work mainly with R, but I have access to and am familiar with other software. I hate SPSS and I may charge you more.
• I have formatting templates, and I like to use them.
• I have my own analysis templates. These include table layouts and charts. I design them to do perform some automated analyses, which speeds up my work. If you want custom ones, you are essentially buying my time.

What I expect from you (aka how to send me the data)

• Some unerstanding of your project and of the science behind it.

• Known objectives. We may refine them, but at least let’t start from a known state.

• Have some data. For a typical project, I expect an Excel or csv file with cases as separate rows and variables as separate columns.

• Your data does not contain any personal or sensitive identifiable information. Remove columns such as patient’s names and ID card numbers. Have an row ID column instead. Ask me before sending me any data.

• Please don’t recode your data as numbers. If your data has “yes”/“no” columns, leave them as text and not change them as 1/0. The same for everything. Make sure the words are consistent (keep in mind that Excel is case-senitive and sensitive to trailing / leading spaces). Let me do the coding, depending on what software I use. Offer me some ordering details if needed.

• If you have missing data, leave the cells empty. Understand that there are two kinds on missing data

  • procedure not performed
  • procedure performed but data not available.

  If you have both in the same column ask me what to do. I’ll probably ask you to leave one empty and the other one with a word indicating missing status.

• Some basic Microsoft Word skills. Be able and willing to:

  • change some text
  • do some formatting
  • add / delete / split / merge table rows or columns
  • delete / split / merge / reorder sections
  • use search and replace
  • understand the concept of styles.