Trends in statistical methods in articles published in Archives of Plastic Surgery between 2012 and 2017

Abstract

This review article presents an assessment of trends in statistical methods and an evaluation of their appropriateness in articles published in the Archives of Plastic Surgery (APS) from 2012 to 2017. We reviewed 388 original articles published in APS between 2012 and 2017. We categorized the articles that used statistical methods according to the type of statistical method, the number of statistical methods, and the type of statistical software used. We checked whether there were errors in the description of statistical methods and results. A total of 230 articles (59.3%) published in APS between 2012 and 2017 used one or more statistical method. Within these articles, there were 261 applications of statistical methods with continuous or ordinal outcomes, and 139 applications of statistical methods with categorical outcome. The Pearson chi-square test (17.4%) and the Mann-Whitney U test (14.4%) were the most frequently used methods. Errors in describing statistical methods and results were found in 133 of the 230 articles (57.8%). Inadequate description of P-values was the most common error (39.1%). Among the 230 articles that used statistical methods, 71.7% provided details about the statistical software programs used for the analyses. SPSS was predominantly used in the articles that presented statistical analyses. We found that the use of statistical methods in APS has increased over the last 6 years. It seems that researchers have been paying more attention to the proper use of statistics in recent years. It is expected that these positive trends will continue in APS.

Aspects of Tertiary Prevention in Patients with Primary Open Angle Glaucoma

“…When the variables were of the score type, the appropriate method of graphical analysis was the scatter plot. For the analysis of the nominal variables, the Chi-Square Test was used to evaluate the existence of a significant difference between two or more samples [ 24 , 25 , 26 ].…”

“…The value of the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin index and the level of significance of the Bartlett sphericity test suggested the existence of one or more common factors and the application of a factor reduction. The analysis of the data after the oblique rotation of the variables correlated with the “Varimax” method allowed the extraction of the factors, the hierarchy of the distribution of the weights of each component and the interpretation of the results [ 26 ]. The p value ≤ 0.05 was considered statistically significant, and the statistical analysis was performed with the program S.P.S.S.-I.B.M.…”

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“…Finally, while taking steps to address the issue of publishing ethics, APS ran an editorial and review article on statistics and ethics [6,7].…”

Pseudo-Ranks: The Better Way of Ranking?

“…Nonparametric rank-based methods are frequently used particularly in the empirical or life sciences research disciplines (e.g., in psychology; see Kanser et al, 2020, and in medicine; see Han and Jung, 2018;Zimmermann et al, 2019). Basically, there might be at least two reasons for that: On the one hand, the fact that rank-based methods are also applicable to ordinal data renders them useful for analyzing qualityof-life scores, disease severity scales, or more generally, any rating or score of (scientific) interest that satisfies some order relation between its categories.…”