Caution regarding the use of pilot studies to guide power calculations for study proposals.

By H. Kraemer, J. Mintz, A. Noda, J. Tinklenberg, J. Yesavage. Archives of General Psychiatry, 2006

684 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8c9304fe691fb28aa647f1a0eca1581caf8e6066

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Citations in the corpus

The Role and Interpretation of Pilot Studies in Clinical Research (2010, positive): “(Friedman, Furberg and DeMets, 1998; Kraemer et al., 2006) Pilot study results should not be used for sample size determination due to the inherent imprecision in between treatment group effect size estimates from studies with small samples.”
Designing a Pilot Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trial for Developing an Adaptive Treatment Strategy (2012, positive): “Following the lead of a diverse set of researchers, statisticians, and methodologists [31–36], we define a pilot study as a small-scale version of the larger study with the aim of fine-tuning the study design, evaluating its feasibility and acceptability, and preparing the research team for a future”
What is a pilot or feasibility study? A review of current practice and editorial policy (2010, background): “However since pilot studies tend to be small, the results should be interpreted with caution [5].”
Sample size planning for statistical power and accuracy in parameter estimation. (2008, neutral): “…to the developments we have described, other important advances are taking place in the role of pilot studies in sample size planning (e.g., Kraemer et al. 2006), methods for dealing with the fact that the effect size is unknowable prior to conducting a study (e.g., O’Hagan et al. 2005),…”
Post hoc power analysis: is it an informative and meaningful analysis? (2019, methodology): “Although similar in apperance, equation (3) is actually quite different from equation (2).”