Dear colleagues
I recently commented to a journal editor that the * notation was regarded as outmoded and widely deplored, and he responded that he'd not seen any condemnation in the places he read. I'm sure he is right, and the same probably goes for most other editors. In the allstat archive (20 July 2000), there is a summary of statisticians' comments on the reporting of p values.
QUESTION: can anyone recommend a cogent and authoritative reference for editors that will persuade them that current practices on the reporting of statistical results can and should be improved?
A Google search shows asterisks used by UK Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety (DHSSPS), Home Office, the National Office of Animal Health, and many other groups. Wikipedia says "Popular levels of significance are 5%, 1% and 0.1%" but quotes J. Scott Armstrong that attempts to educate researchers on how to avoid pitfalls of using statistical significance have had little success.
The strongest advice against that I've found are:
Demographic Research:
"Submissions to our journal should present indicators of statistical significance in a manner that facilitates the interpretation of results, perhaps in separate table columns when appropriate. Significance asterisks are a poor substitute for this."
Political Analysis:
In most cases, the uncertainty of numerical estimates is better conveyed by confidence intervals or standard errors (or complete likelihood functions or posterior distributions), rather than by hypothesis tests and p-values. However, for those authors who wish to report "statistical significance," statistics with probability levels of less than .001, .01, and .05 may be flagged with 3, 2, and 1 asterisks, respectively, with notes that they are significant at the given levels.
Allan
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