SHORT COMMUNICATION

Statistics in Three Biomedical Journals

T. PILČÍK

Received December 12, 2002
Accepted January 22, 2003

Summary
In this paper we analyze the use of statistics and associated problems, in three Czech biological journals in the year 2000. We investigated 23 articles Folia Biologica, 60 articles in Folia Microbiologica, and 88 articles in Physiological Research. The highest frequency of publications with statistical content have used descriptive statistics and t-test. The most usual mistake concerns the absence of reference about the used statistical software and insufficient description of the data. We have compared our results with the results of similar studies in some other medical journals. The use of important statistical methods is comparable with those used in most medical journals, the proportion of articles, in which the applied method is described insufficiently is moderately low.

Key words
Statistics • Usage • Biomedical journals • Assessment

Reprint requests
T. Pilčík, Institute of Molecular Genetics Academy of the Sciences of the Czech Republic, Flemingovo nám. 2, Prague 6, 166 37, Czech Republic. E-mail: pilcik@img.cas.cz