Starting March 2018.
Every manuscript must include an Experimental Design and Statistical Analysis section as a subsection of the Materials and Methods that describes the experimental design and the statistical tests used in the study. Note that a good time to consult a statistician is when planning the study and planning the experimental design.Full details of the experimental design of each individual experiment, including the within- and between-subjects factors and a full description of critical variables required for independent replication (e.g. number of animals of each sex, number of brain slices or cells evaluated per animal, number of litters for developmental studies, etc. and justification of sample size used) should be reported in the Experimental Design and Statistical Analysis section. It is critical to control for multiple comparisons and to note in the text how this has been achieved.
Authors should identify the precise statistical tests used in the Experimental Design and Statistical Analysis section. In addition, planned comparisons, details of controls and power analyses to determine sample sizes, if applicable should be reported. Describe any statistical software used to perform analyses. For highly complex and heterogeneous statistical analyses, rather than providing a list, this section can refer to where details can be found (e.g. “Statistical design for Experiment 1 can be found in the Results describing Figure 2”).
Complete results of the statistical analyses, including degrees of freedom and any estimates of effects size, should be reported in full in the Results section. Report exact p values rather than ranges (e.g. p = 0.026 rather than p < 0.05). There are many types of analyses that can be reported, but examples include F values (F(1, 72) = 14.5, p = 0.003, ANOVA), t values (t(10) = 2.98, p = 0.043, paired t-test), coefficient of determination (R2), and Bayes factors.
The Microbial Biosystems Journal encourages authors to report all data in addition to traditional line and bar graphs, using histograms, scatter plots or other means to represent the variability and complexity of the data.
If the raw data are freely available please state this and how to find them. In addition, if you have pre-registered your study, please state that in the Experimental Design.
The following resources offer helpful guidelines on how to report statistical results:
1- Hesson-McInnis, American Psychological Association. (2010) Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.). Washington, DC. http://my.ilstu.edu/~mshesso/apa_stats.htm 2- Curran-Everett & Benos Guidelines for reporting statistics in journals published by the American Physiological Society. Physiological Genomics (2004) 18(3): 249-251 http://physiolgenomics.physiology.org/content/18/3/249 3- Sarter M, Fritschy JM. Reporting statistical methods and statistical results in EJN. Eur J Neurosci. 2008 Dec;28(12):2363-2364.