[Is it necessary to have advanced statistical knowledge to access medical literacy?]

The introduction of statistical analysis in biomedical journals should be attributed to Dunn and Greenwood in the 1930s, who reflect the concepts of statistical analysis and interpretation. The aim of this study was to analyze the use of different statistical tests and the level of accessibility analysis-dependent and article-dependent of the original articles published in the journal Medicina (B Aires) in the period 2008-2017. A bibliometric, descriptive, observational, cross-sectional study was carried out, in which the original articles were evaluated according to the scale proposed by Mora Ripoll et al. From the 301 articles in Spanish reviewed, 96% presented statistical analyses. Among the 215 articles that used some inferential statistics technique, 49.7% used the chi-square test, z tests for proportions, the Fisher exact test or the McNemar test; 29.2% used student t-tests and z-tests, including the use of these techniques or the use of confidence intervals for medium-conformance contrasts, and/or median-homogeneity (two samples), in paired or independent samples. The results indicate that a reader who knows about the tests included in Level II will have statistical access to 75% of the original articles published. It was found that it is not necessary to have advanced knowledge of statistics to access most publications, but it is important that these contents are developed with emphasis on statistical reasoning over the application and use of software or the choice of the appropriate test.