BACKGROUND The interpretation of scientific articles often requires an understanding of the methods of inferential statistics. This article informs the reader about frequently used statistical tests and their correct application. METHODS The most commonly used statistical tests were identified through a selective literature search on the methodology of medical research publications. These tes...

Climate variability and change are risk factors for climate sensitive activities such as agriculture. Managing these risks requires “climate knowledge”, i.e. a sound understanding of causes and consequences of climate variability and knowledge of potential management options that are suitable in light of the climatic risks posed. Often such information about prognostic variables (e.g. yield, ra...

The eld of statistics can be divided into two branches, descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. Descriptive statistics, as its name suggests, is concerned with describing a population, or a sample from that population, in terms of numerical measures that are computed from data. Such a numerical measure is called a statistic. If the data used in the computation comes from the whole po...

The results are the most significant part of the article since they represent the original work of the authors. It is essential to apply the correct statistical tests. Data should be presented in a comprehensive but simple manner that is easily understandable by the general readership. Care should be taken to keep the tables and graphs simple and uncluttered. Also avoid duplication of the infor...