Science and Darebee Guides

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Knowledge is power but only if it leads to understanding. It is in this spirit of creating better and deeper understanding about health and fitness that DAREBEE guides are created. This is a brief explanation of the structure behind them for your own knowledge and awareness. Each guide is designed to be as comprehensive as possible, backed by research and as practical as possible. Each one addresses, usually, a specific question or subject be it abstract, like motivation, or more practical like how to put on muscle.

Like our workouts each guide starts out as an idea generated by a single person and is then worked on by several people, at least. We collect the science literature to see what studies show that back up or dispel the assertions usually associated with health and fitness. When we do look at studies we have some very specific criteria:

  1. Relevance. Each study we look at has to be as relevant as possible to the subject we are writing about.
  2. Recency. Though, on occasion, we may look at studies that are over twenty years old we, as a rule, look at the freshest, most comprehensive ones first on the understanding that science, its tools and our theories constantly evolve.
  3. Peer review. Every study we cite has been peer-reviewed and published in a field journal that has a good reputation and is historically responsible.
  4. Methodology. We analyze each study's methodology and breadth. A study, for instance, that has no control group (and there are some) or draws data from too narrow a pool to make greater assumptions or draw broad conclusions is of less value than one that has been structured in a more sound way. Having said this we also look carefully at what is being examined. While the tools at our disposal get better and better it is still difficult to ethically examine and test living human subjects so some studies, due to these restrictions, fall short of the methodology criteria we'd like to see applied for that reason but are still of good value.
  5. Expertise. We cite studies carried out by experts in their field because they tend to have a better grasp of the difficulties involved in studying their subject.
  6. Conflicts of interest. We tend to use studies that are not funded by special interest groups and are therefore academic in nature. That way we have greater confidence in their approach and they tend to be a lot less biased and stand the test of time.
Science is not the ultimate answer to anything. It is a tool that generates better knowledge and approaches of greater practical value and it is evolving all the time. The way we structure our guides has evolved over time too. We now include full citations and the links to the studies in question that support each point we make, something which we didn't always do in the past because, generally, in that more innocent time of ten years ago it wasn't usually done.

Where necessary we revisit and update our guides to reflect the latest research. And sometimes, we retire a guide if it it no longer reflects accurate information as we recently did with "Alcohol and Training" for example.

Because each guide can take as long as three weeks to create from start to finish, each one also represents a sizeable investment in time and cost. We have, at the moment, over 130 guides and we have plans to double this number by the end of next year.

I've mentioned all this here so you are all more aware of the process and rigor we put in each one. Because we're not sponsored we can take as a well-balanced approach as possible that places knowledge and practicality above anything else.

If you have any questions or if there are some subjects you think we should cover do not hesitate to let me know below.
 

Saffity

Well-known member
Ranger from Southern Ontario, Canada
Pronouns: She/Her
Posts: 111
"Getting strong enough to keep two tiny humans from unaliving themselves."
Thank you so much @Damer for this insight into how the guides are done. One of the reasons I love Darebee is that I know that everything on this site is based on research and years of experience. There are so many places where things are put together by a person's 'feeling' about something and it's great to know that I can come here and find the most up to date info on all these topics.

Thank you also for fully linking the citations. I am one of the weird people who like to click through and read the papers themselves.
 

Nihopaloa

Well-known member
Duelist from Germany
Posts: 271
"Eyyyy"
I just read through the guide on How To Have More Energy, and have just a tiny suggestion for improvement:
The sources of the studies at the end of the article only have hyperlinks linked to the title of the study. This means that in the whole grey block of text only a small part is actually a link. For example, here:

asdf.png

Only the part highlighted in green is an actual link. It's just a tiny issue, but at first I thought those sources aren't actual links. I'm more used to the whole source being a link, or an icon at the end of the source linking to the article.
Maybe something to consider.
 

Damer

Administrator
DAREBEE Team
Warrior Monk from Terra
Pronouns: He/Him
Posts: 559
I just read through the guide on How To Have More Energy, and have just a tiny suggestion for improvement:
The sources of the studies at the end of the article only have hyperlinks linked to the title of the study. This means that in the whole grey block of text only a small part is actually a link. For example, here:

View attachment 1995

Only the part highlighted in green is an actual link. It's just a tiny issue, but at first I thought those sources aren't actual links. I'm more used to the whole source being a link, or an icon at the end of the source linking to the article.
Maybe something to consider.
@Nihopaloa at times I feel that there simply is no pleasing you. :LOL: There is a technical reason this happens. In the text of the article itself, when we do link to a source, the link is highlighted in the conventional way you'd expect. If we manage to find a workaround we will sort it obviously.
 

Nihopaloa

Well-known member
Duelist from Germany
Posts: 271
"Eyyyy"
@Damer I simply try to make Darebee even better and to that end, I hope my criticism hopefully is mostly constructive and not irritating :eyes:
But I do wonder what you mean with "the link is highlighted in the conventional way you'd expect". If I click on the source number in the text, I get taken down to the sources, where it looks like I posted in the screenshot above. Maybe it's a browser issue or I misunderstood, but there's nothing highlighted for me.
Anyway, another proposal I had was the classic link to another page icon at the end of the source, as I've masterfully drawn here in Paint:
Unbenannt.JPG
I suppose you get what I mean. I don't know if that would be an alternative, just an idea.
As always, thank you for your time to answer :)
 

Damer

Administrator
DAREBEE Team
Warrior Monk from Terra
Pronouns: He/Him
Posts: 559
:LOL: I never thought you had anything other than good intentions @Nihopaloa. To explain what I meant a little clearer, if you look at the first of the ten points in the "How To Have More Energy Guide" you will see red, highlighted text that reads: "...Our guide to better sleep..." It represents a link and takes you to the Guide To Better Sleep page. That part of linking to other pages from within the text is exactly what I meant when I said "the link is highlighted in the conventional way you'd expect". The citation numbers in the body text of the article lead to the citations within the same page. Those citations do contain links to the studies but, as I mentioned, there are some technicalities that prevent us, for now, from making those links more obvious. I have noted it as something to be kept in mind so we can seek a solution.
 
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