Rapid publication-ready MS-Word tables for two-way ANOVA

Abstract

Background: Statistical tables are an essential component of scientific papers and reports in biomedical and agricultural sciences. Measurements in these tables are summarized as mean ± SEM for each treatment group. Results from pairwise-comparison tests are often included using letter displays, in which treatment means that are not significantly different, are followed by a common letter. However, the traditional manual processes for computation and presentation of statistically significant outcomes in MS Word tables using a letter-based algorithm are tedious and prone to errors.

Results: Using the R package 'Shiny', we present a web-based program freely available online, at https://houssein-assaad.shinyapps.io/TwoWayANOVA/. No download is required. The program is capable of rapidly generating publication-ready tables containing two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) results. Additionally, the software can perform multiple comparisons of means using the Duncan, Student-Newman-Keuls, Tukey Kramer, Westfall, and Fisher's least significant difference (LSD) tests. If the LSD test is selected, multiple methods (e.g., Bonferroni and Holm) are available for adjusting p-values. Significance statements resulting from all pairwise comparisons are included in the table using the popular letter display algorithm. With the application of our software, the procedures of ANOVA can be completed within seconds using a web-browser, preferably Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome, and a few mouse clicks. To our awareness, none of the currently available commercial (e.g., Stata, SPSS and SAS) or open-source software (e.g., R and Python) can perform such a rapid task without advanced knowledge of the corresponding programming language.

Conclusions: The new and user-friendly program described in this paper should help scientists perform statistical analysis and rapidly generate publication-ready MS-Word tables for two-way ANOVA. Our software is expected to facilitate research in agriculture, biomedicine, and other fields of life sciences.

Keywords: Agriculture; Biology; Multiple comparisons; Online software; R; Shiny; Statistical analysis; Two-way ANOVA.

Figure 1

A screenshot of the software for scenario (S1). The Excel file Plasma.xls can be downloaded from the “Data Files” panel. Because this file contains a single dataset, the “Single dataset” option is selected (see step 6 above).

Figure 2

A screenshot of the software for scenario (S2). The file workbook.xlsx can be downloaded from the “Data Files” Panel. In the “Choose a Data Format” drop-down menu, the option “Workbook (multiple sheets)” is selected since the file contains multiple sheets/datasets (see step 6 above).