NL888 Posted 13 years ago
Grammar
And error bars and P values for single, ‘representative’ experiments?
Does "and error bars and P values for single, ‘representative’ experiments" mean "and error bars and P values that do not speak for the result they describe for single, ‘representative’ experiments"?
Context:
The incidence of papers in cell and molecular biology that have basic statistical mistakes is alarming. I see
figures with error bars that do not say what they describe, and error bars and P values for single, ‘representative’ experiments. So, as an increasingly weary reviewer of many a biol-ogy publication, I’m going to spell out again
1the basics that every experimental biologist should know.
Context:
The incidence of papers in cell and molecular biology that have basic statistical mistakes is alarming. I see
figures with error bars that do not say what they describe, and error bars and P values for single, ‘representative’ experiments. So, as an increasingly weary reviewer of many a biol-ogy publication, I’m going to spell out again
1the basics that every experimental biologist should know.
Top answer
No. What's he's implying, which you wouldn't be familiar with unless you were familiar with statistics, is that it makes very little sense for data sets consisting of single experiments to have error bars and P values. In fact, he states what he means explicitly in the next paragraph of the article: Simply put, statistics and error bars should be used only for independent data, and not for identical replicates within a single experiment.
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No. What's he's implying, which you wouldn't be familiar with unless you were familiar with statistics, is that it makes very little sense for data sets consisting of single experiments to have error bars and P values.
In fact, he states what he means explicitly in the next paragraph of the article:
In fact, he states what he means explicitly in the next paragraph of the article:
Simply put, statistics and error bars should
be used only f
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