Guidelines for presenting statistics in published papers.

Schriger et al. reviewed many journals, and found that few give detailed guidelines for reporting statistics. The content of medical journal Instructions for authors. Annals of emergency medicine (2006) vol. 48 (6) pp. 743-9, 749.e1-4

The Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Writing and Editing for Biomedical Publications is a lengthy document with guidelines for authors and publishers. But it has only one paragraph about statistics:

"Describe statistical methods with enough detail to enable a knowledgeable reader with access to the original data to verify the reported results. When possible, quantify findings and present them with appropriate indicators of measurement error or uncertainty (such as confidence intervals). Avoid relying solely on statistical hypothesis testing, such as P values, which fail to convey important information about effect size. References for the design of the study and statistical methods should be to standard works when possible (with pages stated). Define statistical terms, abbreviations, and most symbols. Specify the computer software used."

These papers give sensible guidelines for presenting statistical calculations and conclusions:

Curran-Everett and Benos. Guidelines for reporting statistics in journals published by the American Physiological Society. AJP - Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology (2004) vol. 287 (2) pp. G307. Those authors later published a sequel, with additional comments. This sequel references a bunch of papers which critique the guidelines.

Ludbrook. The presentation of statistics in Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology and Physiology. Clin Exp Pharmacol Physiol (2008) vol. 35 (10) pp. 1271-4. Ludbrook has also self published a useful two-page style sheet for mathematical operators and statistical symbols.  

Altman et al. Statistical guidelines for contributors to medical journals. British Medical Journal (1983)

These  papers point out two standard recommendations regarding style that I was not aware of (so haven't followed on this web site or Intuitive Biostatistics):

• They say that the standard error of the mean should be abbreviated as SE, rather than SEM.
• They say that the mean and standard deviation should be written as mean (SD), rather than mean ± SD. If the mean is 11.2 and the standard deviation is 2.4, they suggest reporting 11.2 (2.4) rather than 11.2  ± 2.4. They recommend using that latter syntax only for standard errors, not standard deviations. 

 I have not read the current (second) edition of the book by Lang cited below, but it has received excellent reviews and seems to present sensible and helpful guidelines.