Ask Mallard
An AI research agent for clinicians. MedStatica is the company behind him.
Get your ducks in a row — design, power, methods, oversight.
Mallard turns a plain-language description of a study into a full research plan, sized to the money, time and data you actually have. You write a few sentences about the patients, what you are comparing, and the outcome you care about; it returns the study design, the recommended analysis and why that one, a power and sample-size calculation, a causal diagram, a drafted methods paragraph, a background scan, a read on likely IRB oversight, a costed budget, and runnable code.
It is built for clinicians, residents and trainees planning research without a statistician on hand. Wrong statistics can misdirect a real study, so the plan states its assumptions rather than hiding them.
What a plan contains
- The research question and hypothesis, restated precisely
- The study population, with exclusions to report in a flow diagram
- The study design, and the recommended analysis with the reasoning behind it
- Power and sample size, with the assumptions named and a calculator to re-run them on your own numbers
- An editable causal diagram — change the confounders and the plan rebuilds around your edit
- A drafted methods paragraph, abstract, significance, innovation and limitations
- A background section that looks up real PubMed records for each citation
- A read on which IRB pathway is likely, and what the committee decides rather than the tool
- A data-collection plan and questions worth taking to a statistician
- A budget matched to your funding level
- Runnable R, Python, SAS and Stata code, plus point-and-click steps for SPSS
Free sample-size calculators
These run in the browser and need no account:
More
- Methods and validation — how plans are produced, and how the numbers are checked
- Pricing — free plans each month, with Pro, Teams and bring-your-own-key options
- Privacy — what is stored, and what never leaves your browser
- Terms
A planning aid, not a substitute
Mallard drafts a plan for a qualified person to check. Its output is a starting draft: verify it with a biostatistician and get approval from your IRB or research ethics committee before collecting data. Do not enter protected health information — a study plan never needs patient identifiers.
The interactive app needs JavaScript. Please enable it to describe a study and generate a plan; the calculators and the pages linked above work without it.