Email discussion groups (September 13, 2006)

An email discussion group is a collection of individuals with a common interest who supply their email address to a common site, typically called a listserver. When individuals in that group have questions or comments on a topic of interest, they send an email to the listserver and a copy of that message is sent to everyone in the group.

I learn a lot from various email discussion groups. Here are a few that I like:

• Bioconductor "This mailing list is for announcements about the development of Bioconductor and the availability of new code, questions and answers about problems and solutions using Bioconductor, enhancements and patches to the source code and documentation of Bioconductor, as well as general discussions on topics of interest to the Bioconductor community."
• BUGS "This moderated list has been set up as forum for sharing ideas and asking questions about modelling issues using BUGS. It is NOT intended for problems with crashes, error messages, or `my program won't work'!"
• Edstat-l There is no description at this site, but edstat-l focuses on statistical education.
• Epidemio-l "The discussion of this group focuses on methodological issues that are relevant to epidemiology (classical and otherwise). These are methodological issues that are relevant to population studies which address health problems and questions. The discussions are therefore not restricted to approaches and procedures relevant to studying determinants of health/illness and outcome of interventions, but include approaches relevant to the organization of the health care delivery system."
• Evidence-Based Health There is no description at this site, but another site describes this as "an electronic discussion forum and information resource for people working in and teaching evidence-based health care and its application in health related fields, primarily in the academic community."
• IRB Forum "The IRB Forum (previously known as "MCWIRB") promotes the discussion of ethical, regulatory and policy concerns with human subjects research."
• MedStats "A discussion group for anyone with an interest in Medical Statistics."
• SPSS There is no description at this site, but this list covers issues with the use of SPSS software.

(Postscript: September 26, 2006) The American Statistical Association has number of email discussion groups of interest to statisticians. The page that lists these groups is at

• mail.amstat.org/archives/index.html

This webpage was written by Steve Simon and was last modified on 07/08/2008. Category: Teaching resources