Statistical quality scale 6 (SQS6)

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1 Faculdade de Matematica, Universidade Federal de Uberlândia, Uberlandia, Minas Gerais, Brazil
2 Instituto de Letras e Linguistica, Universidade Federal de Uberlandia, Uberlandia, Minas Gerais, Brazil
3 Departamento de Neurologia, Universidade Federal de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.2609v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Translational Medicine, Statistics
Keywords
Quality, Scale, Statistics
Copyright
© 2016 de Morais et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
de Morais JF, Borges GP, do Prado GF. 2016. Statistical quality scale 6 (SQS6) PeerJ Preprints 4:e2609v1

Abstract

Context. The statistical analysis is an important part of the process of assessing the quality of randomized controlled trials, unfortunately it tends to be underestimated or even omitted by editors, in this sense, scales that cover this gap becomes necessary. Objective. To build a definition and a scale for assessing the quality of statistical analysis in randomized controlled trials. Methods. A content analysis on 16 biostatistics texts was considered in the building of the definition and of the scale. The indicators of quality were based on the description and presentation of results of articles. Results. We identify 32 quality indicators grouping in six dimensions: randomization and management of lost; sample size computation; use of mean and median; statistical test; use and interpretation of confidence interval and P-values. The scale range from 0 to 6 and score greater than three identify article with appropriate statistical analysis. Conclusions. The scale presented three dimensions linked to quality of description and three linked to quality of used strategy.

Author Comment

This paper is part of thesis that study the relationship between quality and visibility of randomized controlled trial published in Web of Science.