Understanding the science behind writing

This review article provides a summary of statistics for busy orthopaedic surgeons. It explains the difference between types of studies and describes the gold standard in research, which is a randomized controlled trial, including blinding and intention to treat. It defines the meanings of difficult terminology, such as null hypothesis, validity, sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values, odds ratio, and others. It also simplifies basic statistics, types of errors, power of study, confidence interval, and the definition of statistical tests. The objectives of this review are to help orthopaedic surgeons better understand scientific writing and to help them in reviewing and writing scientific papers.