Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Too Many Digits: The Presentation of Numerical Data: Tjcole
Too Many Digits: The Presentation of Numerical Data: Tjcole
Too Many Digits: The Presentation of Numerical Data: Tjcole
Too many digits: the presentation risk ratios to three significant digits for
example leads to the largest ratio below 1
Mean Use enough decimal places to give either the SD to two significant digits,7 3320 g
or the SE to one significant digit 3.32 kg Open Access
Percentage Integers, or one decimal place for values under 10%. Values over 90% may 0.1% Scan to access more
free content
need one decimal place if their complement is informative. Use two or 5.3%
more decimal places only if the range of values is less than 0.1% 27%
89% Open Access This is an Open Access article
99.6% distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which
Mean Use enough decimal places to give the SE to one or two significant digits. permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build
difference For a standardised mean difference use one or two decimal places upon this work, for commercial use, provided the
Regression As with the mean difference. original work is properly cited. See: http://
coefficient creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Correlation One or two decimal places, or more when very close to ±1 0.03
coefficient −0.7
0.89
0.999
Risk ratio Round to two significant digits if the leading non-zero digit is four or more, 0.0321
otherwise round to three (the rule of four11). Alternatively use one/two 0.062 To cite Cole TJ. Arch Dis Child 2015;100:608–609.
significant digits rather than two/three. For ORs very close to 1 (eg, in 0.76 Received 2 March 2015
logistic regression with a continuous variable) use three decimal places or 1.05 Revised 13 March 2015
else report the log OR×100 as the percentage odds to one decimal place13 4.2 Accepted 14 March 2015
11.3 Published Online First 15 April 2015
55
1.042 Arch Dis Child 2015;100:608–609.
4.1% doi:10.1136/archdischild-2014-307149
SD One or two significant digits7 570 g
0.57 kg
9 mm Hg REFERENCES
2.5 mL 1 Altman DG, Bland JM. Statistics notes 15.
Presentation of numerical data. BMJ 1996;312:572.
SE One or two significant digits 2 Lang T, Altman D. Basic statistical reporting for
CI Use the same rule as for the corresponding effect size (be it mean, articles published in clinical medical journals: the
percentage, mean difference, regression coefficient, correlation coefficient SAMPL Guidelines. (cited 19 June 2014). http://
or risk ratio), perhaps with one less significant digit www.equator-network.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/
Test statistics: Up to one decimal place and up to two significant digits 07/SAMPL-Guidelines-6-27-13.pdf
t, F, χ2, etc t=−1.3 3 European Association of Science Editors. EASE
F=11 Guidelines for Authors and Translators of Scientific
χs=4.1 Articles to be Published in English. 2014 (cited 26
p value Round up to one significant digit, within the limits shown in the examples. >0.9 June 2014). http://www.ease.org.uk/sites/default/
The lower limit may be smaller than 0.001, but never 0.000. For 0.4 files/ease_guidelines-june2014-english.pdf
genome-wide association studies use the power of 10 format 0.1 4 Haas DM, Caldwell DM, Kirkpatrick P, et al. Tocolytic
0.08 therapy for preterm delivery: systematic review and
0.05 network meta-analysis. BMJ 2012;345:e6226.
0.003 5 Cochrane Collaboration. Cochrane Style Guide. 2010
<0.001 (cited 19 June 2014). 4.1. http://www.cochrane.org/
6.10−9 style-guide/statistical-and-mathematical-presentation
6 American Psychological Association. Publication
manual of the American Psychological Association.
6th edn. Washington DC, 2010.
precision, and that rounding is done only of summary statistic that arise commonly 7 Hopkins WG, Batterham AM, Pyne DB, et al. Sports
at the reporting stage. This raises the in medical scientific writing. The general medicine update response. Scand J Med Sci Spor
2011;21:867–8.
question as to whether the rounded principle is to use two or three significant
8 Zhu J, Lin S, Li M, et al. Effect of in vitro culture
results need extra precision in case they digits for effect sizes, and one or two sig- period on birthweight of singleton newborns. Hum
are later included in meta-analyses. But to nificant digits for measures of variabil- Reprod 2014;29:448–54.
my mind this confuses two distinct aims— ity.3 12 However, optimal precision, like 9 Ahmadu BU, Mustapha B, Bappariya JI, et al. The
to present the results as accessibly as pos- beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and effects of weathering demonstrated by maternal age
on low birth weight outcome in babies. Ethiop J
sible, and to report the results as raw data they should be recognised as recommen- Health Sci 2013;23:27–31.
for meta-analysis. If the two aims are dations not requirements. Their main 10 Banzi R, Cinquini M, Liberati A, et al. Speed of updating
mutually exclusive then the first has to purpose is to address the pervasive online evidence based point of care summaries:
take priority. But in practice they may not problem of reporting too many digits. prospective cohort analysis. BMJ 2011;343:d5856.
11 Cole TJ. Setting the number of decimal places for
be mutually exclusive—where effect sizes Fortunately for us, Emperor Joseph did
reporting risk ratios: the rule of four. BMJ 2015;In
are rounded to two or three significant not tell Mozart which notes he should press.
digits the rounding error variance is likely cut, but here researchers have a clear steer 12 Wainer H. Improving tabular displays, with NAEP
to be small compared with the inter-study as to which digits they can ditch. tables as examples and inspirations. J Educ Behav
variance, making the rounding impreci- Stat 1997;22:1–30.
13 Cole TJ. Sympercents: symmetric percentage
sion relatively unimportant. Competing interests None. differences on the 100 loge scale simplify the
Table 1 gives an evidence-based set of Provenance and peer review Commissioned; presentation of log transformed data. Stat Med
recommendations for rounding the types internally peer reviewed. 2000;19:3109–25.
Cole TJ. Arch Dis Child July 2015 Vol 100 No 7 609