The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Parkville, Victoria 3052, Australia.
Annu Rev Cell Dev Biol. 2014;30:23-37. doi: 10.1146/annurev-cellbio-100913-013303. Epub 2014 Jul 2.
The physicist Ernest Rutherford said, "If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment." Although this aphorism remains true for much of today's research in cell biology, a basic understanding of statistics can be useful to cell biologists to help in monitoring the conduct of their experiments, in interpreting the results, in presenting them in publications, and when critically evaluating research by others. However, training in statistics is often focused on the sophisticated needs of clinical researchers, psychologists, and epidemiologists, whose conclusions depend wholly on statistics, rather than the practical needs of cell biologists, whose experiments often provide evidence that is not statistical in nature. This review describes some of the basic statistical principles that may be of use to experimental biologists, but it does not cover the sophisticated statistics needed for papers that contain evidence of no other kind.
物理学家欧内斯特·卢瑟福曾说过：“如果你的实验需要统计学，那你应该做一个更好的实验。” 虽然这句话在今天的细胞生物学研究中仍然适用，但对统计学的基本了解对于细胞生物学家来说是有用的，可以帮助他们监控实验的进行、解释结果、在出版物中呈现结果，以及在批判性评估他人的研究时。然而，统计学方面的培训通常侧重于临床研究人员、心理学家和流行病学家的复杂需求，他们的结论完全依赖于统计学，而不是细胞生物学家的实际需求，因为细胞生物学家的实验通常提供的证据不是统计学性质的。这篇综述描述了一些可能对实验生物学家有用的基本统计原则，但它没有涵盖那些包含其他类型证据的论文所需的复杂统计学知识。
