The panacea statistical toolbox of a biomedical peer reviewer

Abstract

The main role of a peer reviewer is to make judgments on the research articles by asking a number of questions to evaluate the quality of the research article. Statistics is a major part of any biomedical research article, and most reviewers gain their experiences in manuscript reviewing by undertaking it but not through an educational process. Therefore, reviewers of the biomedical journals normally do not have enough knowledge and skills to evaluate the validity of statistical methods used in biomedical research articles submitted for consideration. Hence, inappropriate statistical analysis in medical journals can lead to misleading conclusions and incorrect results. In this paper, the most common basic statistical guidelines are described that might be a road map to the biomedical reviewers. It is not meant for statisticians or medical editors who have special interest and expertise in statistical analysis.

doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.12669/pjms.314.8611

How to cite this:Skaik Y. The panacea statistical toolbox of a biomedical peer reviewer. Pak J Med Sci 2015;31(4):999-1001.   doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.12669/pjms.314.8611

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.