Statistical tools in published articles of a public health journal in 2013 and 2014: bibliometric cross-sectional study.

INTRODUCTION Research projects use statistical resources to express in numerical or graphic terms different magnitudes like frequencies, differences or associations. OBJECTIVES The purpose of this paper is to describe the statistics tools utilization, with special emphasis in the use of conventional statistical tests and confidence intervals, to communicate results in a renowned public health peer reviewed journal in Colombia. METHODS We included the 84 articles published in the journal between 2013 and 2014. RESULTS The most used resource is frequency analysis (89.3%), followed by p values (65.5%) and confidence intervals (53.6%); 48.9% of the papers used confidence intervals together with p values; 29.8% use neither of them; 16.7% of the articles only used p values and 4.8% only confidence intervals. CONCLUSIONS Descriptive statistics is a tool widely used in research results presentation; the critics and caveats suggesting to avoid the exclusive use of the statistical signification test in the results presentation are not followed in the analysis and presentation of the research results.