Consulting

The Biostatistics unit's consulting service

The first point of contact is the e-form. Use this to set up a personal consultation about your statistical questions/problems.

Fill it in to provide us with essential information about your research, so that we can assess and address your case efficiently. We will provide consultation through meetings (on site or online) and/or e-mail, depending on the questions and client's wishes. We aim to reply to all requests within one week.

Contact us early in your study to get the most out of our support service!

For shorter/simpler questions, we hold drop-in workshops every other Wednesday.

At these sessions we aim to spend max. 15 minutes with each customer. More in-depth questions require a personal consultation, which you can .
Service overview

The service offers personalised biostatistical consultation in the following areas:

  • planning the research e.g. planning the tests, power calculations
  • advising on analysing data e.g. choosing the statistical analysis model, advising in how to run the analysis on statistical software
  • interpreting results
  • preparing reports and scientific publications

The statistical consulting focuses mainly on helping researchers to plan and do their own analyses; we do not do the analysis for you. Researchers are expected to have at least some experience with some statistical software beforehand, because the time for consulting is limited. For those who have no experience at all, there are courses to get started: see e.g. and . Please note that you need to provide the statistician with enough information about necessary details of your research in order for the consultation to proceed successfully.

Note that if you have a big deadline coming (such as grant application) you should contact us well in advance. Grant application and similar deadlines can cause congestion in the service even though the consultants do their very best to help everyone on time.

The service is free until further notice. We provide service in Finnish, Swedish and English.

 
Target group

The service is primarily targeted to researchers and research groups at The Faculty of Medicine in the University of Helsinki, HUCH and FIMM. As far as possible the service is also offered to both undergraduate and doctoral students.
Service principles

There is an authorship condition assumed in cases where the biostatistician contributes considerably to the research leading to the scientific publication, and thus meets authorship criteria such as conception and design of study, analysing data and / or interpreting results, drafting and / or revising the article (e.g. ).

Based on the , requests undergo evaluation in the order of arrival and are routed to the queue according to the urgency and priority status assigned during evaluation. Projects at an early stage (planning, data collection) are prioritized over those at later stage, because early-stage consultation provides more opportunities and advantages to the research.