A 5-year review of statistical methods presented in The Journal of Foot & Ankle Surgery

This article presents a review of the statistical analyses used by authors and published in The Journal of Foot & Ankle Surgery from January 2004 to December 2008. Of the 215 articles reviewed, descriptive statistics were used in 84% and comparative statistics in 68%. The most commonly used comparative statistical tests were Student t test (30%), analysis of variance (14%), the Mann Whitney U test (Wilcoxon rank sum) test (13%), chi-squared analyses (11%), and Fisher's exact test (10%). The aim of this investigation was to review the prevalences of various statistical methods used by foot and ankle surgeons, as reported in The Journal of Foot & Ankle Surgery, and to serve as a primer of the most common methods used in the analysis of surgical data and the development of a scientific basis for the practice of foot and ankle surgery.