Ten simple rules for writing statistical book reviews
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Abstract
Statistical books are an opportunity for accessing relatively deeper insights into statistics and software even outside the introductory classroom setting. There are however many resources available to the practitioner in addition to the traditional text model. Book reviews can thus provide a critical mechanism for the learner to assess whether the commitment to a specific book warrants the allocated time and effort. The ten simple rules format, pioneered in computational biology, was applied here to writing effective book reviews for statistics because of the breadth offerings in this domain including topical introductions, computational solutions, and theory. Learning by doing is a popular paradigm in statistics and computation, but there is still a niche for books in the pedagogy of self-taught and instruction-based learning. Primarily, these rules ensure that book reviews function as a form of short syntheses to inform and guide readers in deciding to use a specific book relative to other options for statistical challenges.
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2018. Ten simple rules for writing statistical book reviews. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26924v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26924v1Author comment
This is a pre-print.
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Competing Interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Christopher J Lortie conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, authored or reviewed drafts of the paper, approved the final draft.
Data Deposition
The following information was supplied regarding data availability:
The research in this article did not generate any data or code because this is an opinion paper.
Funding
The York University Faculty Association and The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis supported this synthesis project. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
