Adv Physiol Educ 31: 305, 2007;
doi:10.1152/advan.00087.2007.
Sustained efforts should promote statistics literacy in physiology.
Commentary on “Guidelines for reporting statistics in journals published by
the American Physiological Society: the sequel”
Bryan Mackenzie
Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Cincinnati, Ohio
DOUGLAS CURRAN-EVERETT, DALE BENOS, and the editors of the
American Physiological Society journals are to be commended
for their efforts to raise the standards of statistics reporting in
physiology journals. I read with interest the followup (in this
issue) to the 2004 guidelines (2), and I am glad to see those
efforts sustained. Curran-Everett and Benos reported that “the
mere publication of the guidelines failed to impact reporting
practices” (at least with regard to the use of standard devia-
tions, confidence intervals, and precise P values), but I offer
that it is still too early to assess. Change comes about slowly.
If investigators fully embraced the guidelines, which include
guidelines on planning the study and establishing the critical
significance level ␣, we should only now begin to see signif-
icant change in the resulting publications. Still, there are those
who remain to be persuaded.
As I have talked with colleagues about the 2004 guidelines,
the issue of standard deviation versus standard error has drawn
the strongest reaction, so I am pleased that this is given special
attention in the followup. Figure 1 there illustrates that the
sample standard deviation (s, SD), but not the standard error of
the sample mean (SEM), describes the variability within the
sample, and your other commentators have more eloquently
argued this point than can I. Figure 1 in the followup also
reminds us that just how well sample standard deviation
approximates the population standard deviation (␴) depends on
sample size (n); hence, the importance of specifying the value
of n despite the common idea that it is not necessary when
reporting sample standard deviations. Meanwhile, the utility of
SEM in making between-group inferences (when its relation-
ship to confidence intervals is understood) has not been under-
stated (see also Ref. 1).
Investigators may be more readily accepting of the push to
report precise P values. I would add that reiterating “not
significant” alongside the precise P value may be helpful when
accepting the null hypothesis since readers may be accustomed
to seeing P values only when they are used to report significant
differences.
Address for reprint requests and other correspondence: B. Mackenzie,
Dept. of Molecular and Cellular Physiology, Univ. of Cincinnati College of
Medicine, PO Box 670576, Cincinnati, OH 45267-0576 (e-mail:
bryan.mackenzie@uc.edu).
1043-4046/07 $8.00 Copyright © 2007 The American Physiological Society
Commentary
A common reporting deficiency not discussed in the guide-
lines is the omission of the absolute value of the 100% or
control value (and a measure of its variability) in the presen-
tation of normalized data. Adding it to the figure legend is no
difficult task, and its inclusion is necessary for other investi-
Downloaded from http://advan.physiology.org/ by guest on March 20, 2013
gators in planning future studies.
While some may disagree with specific recommendations in
the guidelines and others may fear them too prescriptive, the
guidelines for reporting statistics certainly have physiologists
talking more about statistics in general. That’s good. Perhaps
the wider benefit will be to promote statistics literacy within
our discipline. After all, the literature contains more egregious
statistical errors than error bar deficiencies, and such errors
spring faulty conclusions. The guidelines now need to be
backed by efforts on at least two fronts. The first is in better
educating our students. A new graduate course “Statistical
Methods in Physiology” at this institution is set to become part
of the core curricula for our PhD programs in physiology,
systems biology, neuroscience, and pharmacology and our MS
program in physiology. I hope that other institutions are giving
the same priority to statistics courses. The second is in the
review process. Tom Lang, in his commentary, places the ball
squarely in the court of editors when he “doubt[s] that anything
will change until journals stop accepting manuscripts in which
the statistics are incorrectly reported.” Editors need to provide
reviewers explicit permission to call attention to errors in
statistical analysis or reporting in manuscripts under review,
and editors should weigh such criticisms as they would criti-
cisms of the biology or experimental approach. I suspect that it
is presently all too easy for authors to dismiss criticisms
concerning statistics, as in the example cited by one of the
commentators in the followup. We need to be reminded that
careful statistical analyses are not icing; they are central to
reaching valid and unbiased conclusions.
REFERENCES
1. Cumming G, Fidler F, Vaux DL. Error bars in experimental biology.
J Cell Biol 177: 7–11, 2007.
2. Curran-Everett D, Benos DJ. Guidelines for reporting statistics in jour-
nals published by the American Physiological Society. Am J Physiol
Gastrointest Liver Physiol 287: G307–G309, 2004.
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