‘It is exceedingly difficult to explain many statistical concepts interms that are both technically accurate and easily understood bythose with only a cursory knowledge of the topic.’This wise note appears at the opening of a valuable book onreporting statistics.1 In this series so far, we have tackled this difficulttask, and accommodated the need to ‘avoid the fine points and distinctionsthat would detract from an explanation otherwise adequatefor most readers’. In other words, we are writing for a readership ofscience authors and not for professional statisticians. Even statisticiansdiffer between one another in their preferences and procedures,and for consistency we shall continue to use the book cited above(apart from small deviations) as the basis for a uniform set of suggestions.Ultimately, this will become a substantial list, but we will crossreference this list to the concepts and principles we address in furtherarticles. In this long list of suggestions, we shall give reasons formaking these suggestions. A good analogy is a cookery recipe.
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