Whoops! Missed a week… sorry. Here are five stories of interest from the evaluation world.

1. The IFS launched the IFS Deaton Review, with Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton (gettit?). The idea is to bring together people from many disciplines to ‘build a comprehensive understanding of inequalities in the twenty-first century’, as well as ‘to provide solutions’.
2. However, not everyone was too impressed. 40 researchers criticised the make up of the panel, and Faiza Shaheen gave a more personal take on non-white exclusion (and the terms for inclusion) on panels such as these.
3. Annette Brown has been looking at the literature on gender bias in grant proposal reviewing — summarising her thoughts here.
4. With possible implications for other evaluation research, a new paper from IJE concludes that when estimating non-specific effects of vaccines there can be bias from right or let censoring, which needs to be accounted for.
5. A review in JAMA Oncology looked at 143 anticancer drug approvals by the FDA and found that 17% of those approved had ‘suboptimal’ control arms. The implication being that the effectiveness of the drugs were being overestimated. This review emphasises the equal importance of understanding the intervention and the control arm; evaluations too often neglect to describe the control arms in much detail.

As always, please send ideas to calum.davey@lshtm.ac.uk.

Have a good long weekend!