A review of the 1977 and the 1994 British Medical Journal (BMJ) was undertaken to determine how the application of statistics to medical research may have changed over the last two decades. The measures of outcome chosen were statistical (co-)authorship of, and references to, the statistical literature in papers and the statistical techniques and methodologies applied in the research presented. The 17 years between the two issues of the BMJ witnessed a considerable change as regards any of the chosen parameters mentioned, with a doubling in the number of papers with statistical (co-)authorship, a five-fold increase in the number of papers containing statistical references, and references to statistical software in more than one third of the papers in 1994, compared to no more than in 1% in 1977.
