关于Nature上的统计学问题指南.pptVIP

An editorial of Nature Medicine ?(2005) Statistically significant : “Some of the articles published in Nature and Nature Medicine were criticized due to the deficiency in statistical issues”. What happened? Emili García-Berthou and Carles Alcaraz (Girona Univ., Spain) published an article in BMC Medical Research Methodology (May 2004). They reviewed 181 research papers of Nature (2001) , found that 38% of them have at least one mistake in statistics. Since then, a series of critical articles have been published, of which one written by Robert Matthews (The Financial Times) analyzed the statistical methodology of the articles in Nature Medicine (2000).They found that 31% of the authors had misunderstood the meaning of P-value, even some one reported the P-value with unnecessary precision ( 0.002387). Independent statistical “audit” Nature Medicine invited two experts from the University of Columbia to work out “statistical audit” , especially to evaluate 21 articles published in 2003 with a list of consolidated criteria on statistics. They found that some papers almost did not have any quantitative analysis, and some contained very complicated statistical and mathematical issues. While most of them have just used a litter statistical testing, but with incomplete descriptions such that one could hardly assess whether they were appropriate or not. To have an 85% chance of detecting as significant (at the two sided 5% level) a five point difference between the two groups in the mean SF- 36 general health perception scores, with an assumed standard deviation of 20 and a loss to follow up of 20%, 360 women (720 in total) in each group were required. 3. Identified all statistical methods unambiguously 4. If statistical methods were described adequately, were any of them clearly inappropriate? Example All data analysis was carried out according to a pre-established analysis plan. Proportions were compared by tests with continuity correction or Fisher’s