Jargonin Statistics (created 2000-01-27).

Dear Professor Mean, I have to review a paper for journal club and I don't understand all the obscure statistical jargon that the authors use.

I have a fictional story that I tell people. It's about someone who comes to my office and says he has trouble understanding a recently published paper. I look at the title "In vitro and in vivo assessment of Endothelin as a biomarker of iatrogenically induced alveolar hypoxia in neonates" and say that I understand why you would have trouble with a paper like this. Yeah, he says in return, I don't understand what this boxplot is.

Don't be intimidated by technical terms. You should focus not on how the data was analyzed, but on how the data was collected. The four big issues in data collection are

1. randomization,
2. blinding,
3. exclusions/dropouts, and
4. protocol deviations.

You don't need a Ph.D. in Statistics to assess these issues.

Further reading

• Association between air pollution and acute childhood wheezy episodes: prospective observational study.
  Buchdahl R, Parker A, Stebbings T, Babiker A.
  BMJ 1996 Mar 16; 312(7032): 661-5.
  http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/312/7032/661
• Biostatistics. The Bare Essentials
  Norman GR, Streiner DL.
  St. Louis MO: Mosby-Year Book, Inc. (1994)
  ISBN: 1-55664-369-1.
• Data Analysis and Statistics for Nursing Research.
  Polit DF.
  Stamford CT: Appleton & Lange (1996)
  ISBN: 0-8385-6329-5.
• Fundamentals of Biostatistics, Third Edition.
  Rosner B.
  Belmont CA: Duxbury Press (1990)
  ISBN: 0-534-91973-1.

This webpage was originally published at the StATS website, which is currently unavailable. There is a dispute about the ownership of these pages, so I am only able to include a brief excerpt from this page.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. This page was written by Steve Simon and was last modified on 2010-04-01. Need more information? I have a page with general help resources. You can also browse for pages similar to this one at Category: Critical appraisal.