ArticleMedicine and science in sports and exercise2015
"Magnitude-based inference": a statistical review.
Article in Medicine and science in sports and exercise, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 29 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
29 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Integrating physical and tactical factors in football using positional data: a systematic review.PeerJ · 2022Pooled it
- Call to increase statistical collaboration in sports science, sport and exercise medicine and sports physiotherapy.British journal of sports medicine · 2021Pooled it
- Systematic review of the use of "magnitude-based inference" in sports science and medicine.PloS one · 2020Pooled it
- Individual cardiovascular responsiveness to work-matched exercise within the moderate- and severe-intensity domains.European journal of applied physiology · 2021Trial
- The effect of 6 days of alpha glycerylphosphorylcholine on isometric strength.Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition · 2015Trial
- Sports Metaresearch: An Emerging Discipline of Sport Science and Medicine.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2025Review
- Frequentist, Bayesian Analysis and Complementary Statistical Tools for Geriatric and Rehabilitation Fields: Are Traditional Null-Hypothesis Significance Testing Methods Sufficient?Clinical interventions in aging · 2024Article
- Acute Effects of Carbon Fiber Insole on Three Aspects of Sports Performance, Lower Extremity Muscle Activity, and Subjective Comfort.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Recommendations for the design of randomized controlled trials in strength and conditioning. Common design and data interpretation.Frontiers in sports and active living · 2022Article
- Replacing statistical significance and non-significance with better approaches to sampling uncertainty.Frontiers in physiology · 2022Article
- Article
- The Use of Ratings of Perceived Exertion in Children and Adolescents: A Scoping Review.Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 2021Article
- Four-month operational heat acclimatization positively affects the level of heat tolerance 6 months later.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- DURATION OF MYOFASCIAL ROLLING FOR OPTIMAL RECOVERY, RANGE OF MOTION, AND PERFORMANCE: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE.International journal of sports physical therapy · 2019Article
- Childhood obesity intervention studies: A narrative review and guide for investigators, authors, editors, reviewers, journalists, and readers to guard against exaggerated effectiveness claims.Obesity reviews : an official journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity · 2019Review
- Magnitude-based Inference is not Bayesian and is not a valid method of inference.Scandinavian journal of medicine & science in sports · 2019Article
- Precision exercise medicine: understanding exercise response variability.British journal of sports medicine · 2019Article
- Coach Turnover in Top Professional Brazilian Football Championship: A Multilevel Survival Analysis.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- The Impact of a Ballet and Modern Dance Performance on Heart Rate Variability in Collegiate Dancers.Sports (Basel, Switzerland) · 2018Article
- Reporting Characteristics in Sports Nutrition.Sports (Basel, Switzerland) · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Commented on by
- Commented on byResponse.2015
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
purposeWe consider "magnitude-based inference" and its interpretation by examining in detail its use in the problem of comparing two means.
methodsWe extract from the spreadsheets, which are provided to users of the analysis (http://www.sportsci.org/), a precise description of how "magnitude-based inference" is implemented. We compare the implemented version of the method with general descriptions of it and interpret the method in familiar statistical terms. RESULTS AND
conclusionsWe show that "magnitude-based inference" is not a progressive improvement on modern statistics. The additional probabilities introduced are not directly related to the confidence interval but, rather, are interpretable either as P values for two different nonstandard tests (for different null hypotheses) or as approximate Bayesian calculations, which also lead to a type of test. We also discuss sample size calculations associated with "magnitude-based inference" and show that the substantial reduction in sample sizes claimed for the method (30% of the sample size obtained from standard frequentist calculations) is not justifiable so the sample size calculations should not be used. Rather than using "magnitude-based inference," a better solution is to be realistic about the limitations of the data and use either confidence intervals or a fully Bayesian analysis.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.