CRITICAL APPRAISAL SERIES
Critical appraisal for emergency medicine 2: Statistics
Correspondence to:
Professor S Goodacre, Medical Care Research Unit, University of Sheffield, Regent Court, 30 Regent Street, Sheffield S1 4DA, UK; s.goodacre@sheffield.ac.uk
Accepted 6 January 2008
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Critical appraisal of the statistical aspects of an article can be taxing for anyone without expert knowledge. It is tempting to seek out statistical "rules" that can be used to identify flaws in a study, but few situations are sufficiently cut and dried to allow such a crude approach. It is worth bearing in mind that statistics is a specialist field. The idea of a clinician dabbling in statistics should alarm us as much as the idea of a statistician dabbling in clinical medicine.
Statistics should help readers, not baffle them. The findings of nearly all quantitative medical research are subject to a degree of uncertainty arising from random error, as described in the first article in this series. Appropriate use of statistics should help the reader to understand how the findings of a study may be influenced by this uncertainty. The most useful way of appraising the statistical aspects
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