ArticleFamily medicine2025
Misalignment of Biostatistics Content Between Licensing Exam Study Aids and Contemporary Medical Research.
Article in Family medicine, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND
objectivesMedical trainees express difficulty with interpreting statistics in clinical literature. To elucidate educational gaps, we compared statistical methodologies in biomedical literature with biostatistical content in licensing exam study materials.
methodsIn this bibliographic content analysis, we compiled a stratified random sample of articles involving original data analysis published during 2023 in 72 issues of three major medical journals. We recorded all discrete statistical methods and concepts detailed in the methods section of the articles and in three commercial licensing exam study resources. We created a unified list of discrete methods or concepts to define overarching domains and mapped each method to a domain to determine that domain's presence in each resource or article.
resultsIn a sample of 273 journal articles and three study resources, we identified 1,057 unique key words mapped onto 20 domains. Statistical error, significance, power analysis, and group comparisons of categorical data were high-frequency domains among the articles. Overall, 63% of articles included methods from domains not covered in any study resource.
conclusionsMedical licensing exam preparation does not reflect the breadth of contemporary statistics in biomedical research. Future interventions should expand medical students' understanding of research protocols and complex data manipulation.
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.