Announcement
British Medical Journal: Statistics
Notes
Perhaps the finest series of short articles on
the use of statistics is the occasional series of Statistics Notes
started in 1994 by the British Medical Journal. It should be required
reading in any introductory statistics course. The full text of all but
the first ten articles is available is available on the World Wide Web.
The articles are listed here chronologically.
Absence
of evidence is not evidence of absence is something every
investigator should know, but too few do. Along with Interaction 2:
compare effect sizes not P values, these articles describe two of the
most common fatal mistakes in manuscripts submitted to research journals.
The faulty reasoning leading to these errors is so seductive that papers
containing these errors sometimes slip through the reviewing
process and misinterpretations of data are published as fact.
Correlation, regression, and repeated data, Calculating
correlation coefficients with repeated observations: Part 1--correlation
within subjects, and Calculating correlation coefficients with
repeated observations: Part 2--correlation between subjects provide
an excellent introduction to the subtleties of analyzing repeated
measurements on the same subject.
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