IPPCR 2019 Overview of Hypothesis Testing Part 3 of 5

>> Paul Wakim: Hello. I'm Paul Wakim. I'm chief of the biostatistics and clinical epidemiology service at the NIH clinical center, and this is part three of hypothesis testing. And in this part, we're going to talk something really exciting that is happening really right now, spring 2019. And you'll see what I'm talking about.

It's about the ASA and the reporting of p-values. The ASA stands for the American Statistical Association. But let me start with the reporting of the p-value. And let me start with how not to report p-values. This is the old way, and we really need to change this practice. We, the scientific community. And what I'm talking about is when,

you know, you publish your manuscript and you put a table and you have stars and then a footnote. And it says p-value of less than .05. We need to stop doing that. The [laughs] irony of this is that I'm a co-author of this paper. This was back in 2009, and I basically --

I remember even back then, I didn't like that. I didn't like the star, p-value less than .05. And I told the lead author about it. That -- you know, can't we put the actual value of the p-values. And basically, the answer was, "Well this is the format of the journal. This is the way the journal wants it.

And so, that's why we had to do it this way." But it's changing. This is going to change. This is, of course, 10 years ago. So, it is changing. But just want to make sure that this is not the way to do it. Instead, how to report it is you just put the value

of the p-value, like in this table. They actually, the authors, give the value of the p-value. And you say, okay, fine. Well, it is important because look at those two p-values that are highlighted. One is .062, and one is .042. Same table. Two p-values. Now, if we were to put stars, you know, the first one would not get a star,