title: Understanding the effect size and its measures.
abstract: The evidence based medicine paradigm demands scientific reliability, but modern research seems to overlook it sometimes. The power analysis represents a way to show the meaningfulness of findings, regardless to the emphasized aspect of statistical significance. Within this statistical framework, the estimation of the effect size represents a means to show the relevance of the evidences produced through research. In this regard, this paper presents and discusses the main procedures to estimate the size of an effect with respect to the specific statistical test used for hypothesis testing. Thus, this work can be seen as an introduction and a guide for the reader interested in the use of effect size estimation for its scientific endeavour.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory Medicine Department, "Tor Vergata" University Hospital, Rome, Italy; Department of Human Physiology and Pharmacology, University of Rome Sapienza, Rome, Italy.
authors.forename: Cristiano
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Ialongo
mesh_terms: D035843:Biomedical Research / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D056808:Biostatistics / Q000379:methods*; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D006801:Humans; D018401:Sample Size; D013223:Statistics as Topic
keywords: biostatistics; statistical data analysis; statistical data interpretation