Comparison of statistical methods, type of articles and study design used in selected Pakistani medical journals in 1998 and 2007

Objectives: to compare the statistical methods, types of article and design of studies used in 1998 and 2007 articles of leading indexed and non-indexed medical journals of pakistan. methods: six leading medical journals of pakistan: (1) jcpsp, (2) jpma, (3) jamc, (4) pjms, (5) pjmr, and (6) pafmj, were selected for this study. articles reviewed were 1057 to achieve the above mentioned objective. results: the articles reviewed for 1998 and 2007 were 366 and 691, respectively. original articles contributed the maximum percentage of 65.6%, followed by case reports with 24.8%. the contribution of case reports in 1998 was 20.5% which increased to 27.1% in 2007. there was no statistically significant difference between 'indexed' and 'non-indexed' journals for different type of statistical methods in 1998 or 2007. in total, 749 articles were categorized as 'original articles' or 'short communication'. among them, 51% articles mentioned study design and 67.3% of them were correct for the respective methodology. in 1998, 202 (74%) articles did not use any statistics or indicated only descriptive statistics, while in 2007, 239 (50.2%) articles did the same. the reader who was familiar with t-test and contingency tables in 1998 could have understood 97.4% of the scientific articles. however, this percentage dropped to 83.0% in 2007. conclusions: quality of elaborating methods and usage of biostatistics in 6 leading pakistani medical journals improved from 1998 to 2007, but has still to come up as compared to other western medical journals.