Research Methods in Weed Science: Statistics

Abstract

There are various reasons for using statistics, but perhaps the most important is that the biological sciences are empirical sciences. There is always an element of variability that can only be dealt with by applying statistics. Essentially, statistics is a way to summarize the variability of data so that we can confidently say whether there is a difference among treatments or among regression parameters and tell others about the variability of the results. To that end, we must use the most appropriate statistics to get a “correct” picture of the experimental variability, and the best way of doing that is to report the size of the parameters or the means and their associated standard errors or confidence intervals. Simply declaring that the yields were 1 or 2 ton ha−1does not mean anything without associated standard errors for those yields. Another driving force is that no journal will accept publications without the data having been subjected to some kind of statistical analysis.