NEW at Sportscience

[Will Hopkins]

Yes, a new issue of Sportscience is up at https://sportsci.org. All I could manage last year was a homepage with links to highlights from 1997-2024. This year I discovered artificial intelligence, and I've had a hugely productive and fun time with it. I started publishing In-brief items and articles in August, but I delayed announcing them here until I had finished the most  important article and spreadsheet: A Framework for Bayesian Utility Magnitude-Based Decisions.

Utility MBD is all about taking an effect (your own, or published) then deriving an "expected utility" score, which takes into account not only the probabilities of benefit and harm, but also the values of the different beneficial and harmful magnitudes, along with the probabilities and values of any side effects and implementation costs. If the score exceeds the smallest important beneficial value, the effect might be worth implementing, but you have to take other things into account to reach a final decision: the strength of evidence provided by the posterior credible interval, the proportions of beneficial and harmful responders (or settings, if the data come from a meta-analysis), and a sensitivity analysis of the subjective inputs and systematic bias.

It sounds complicated, but then real-life decisions are complicated. The great thing about the article and spreadsheet is that it helps you think about the values of everything involved in the decision. Check it out, and check out the fun I've had with "Hal" (Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro) and Anthropic's Claude in writing the other articles and In-brief items.

I'll try to make this list active again by posting research-related questions I receive and my responses to them. You should also post any research questions to sport...@googlegroups.com.

Will