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Published on: August 1, 2017
Statistical Reporting in Nursing Research: Addressing a Common Error in Reporting of p Values (p = .000)
Yanni Wu1, Chunlan Zhou2, Run Wang3
1Senior Editor, Journal of Nursing (China), Nanfang Hospital, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, PR China.
Purpose:
The confidence in a study will be reduced due to the incorrect representation of statistical results. However, it is unknown to what extent p values are incorrectly represented in published nursing journals. The study aims to evaluate the articles in 30 nursing journals in terms of the error in reporting of p values (p = .000).
Design And Methods:
This was a bibliometric analysis. All papers published in 10 leading nursing journals (between 2015 and 2019), the 10 bottom nursing journals (2019), and 10 selected key nursing journals (2019) indexed in the Science Citation Index Journal Citation Reports were reviewed to detect errors in reporting of p values (p = .000).
Results:
A total of 3,788 papers were reviewed. Notably, it was found that 93.3% (28/30) of the nursing journals contained incorrect representation of p values (p = .000). The reporting rate of these journals ranges from 0% to 57.1%, with an overall rate of 12.8% (486/3,788). In addition, the rate of incorrect representation of p values (p = .000) showed no statistically significant difference between different publication years (Χ2 = 4.976, p = .290). However, the rate of reporting was different between study types, journals, and regions (p = .007, p = .020, and p < .001, respectively).
Conclusions:
The incorrect representation of p values is common in nursing journals.
Clinical Relevance:
We recommend that both publishers and researchers be responsible for preventing statistical errors in manuscripts. Furthermore, various kinds of statistical training methods should be adopted to ensure that nurses and journal reviewers have enough statistical literacy.
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