Statistical Methods For Research Workers

''Statistical Methods for Research Workers'' is a classic book on statistics, written by the statistician R. A. Fisher. It is considered by some to be one of the 20th century's most influential books on statistical methods, together with his '' The Design of Experiments'' (1935). It was originally published in 1925, by Oliver & Boyd (Edinburgh); the final and posthumous 14th edition was published in 1970. The impulse to write a book on the statistical methodology he had developed came not from Fisher himself but from D. Ward Cutler, one of the two editors of a series of "Biological Monographs and Manuals" being published by Oliver and Boyd.

Reviews

According to Denis Conniffe:

Ronald A. Fisher was "interested in application and in the popularization
of statistical methods and his early book ''Statistical Methods for Research Workers'', published in 1925, went through many editions and
motivated and influenced the practical use of statistics in many fields of
study. His ''Design of Experiments'' (1935) romotedstatistical technique and application. In that book he
emphasized examples and how to design experiments systematically from
a statistical point of view. The mathematical justification of the methods
described was not stressed and, indeed, proofs were often barely sketched
or omitted altogether ..., a fact which led H. B. Mann to fill the gaps with a rigorous mathematical treatment in his well-known treatise, ."

According to Erich L. Lehmann:

Even reviewers who were not offended by Fisher's attack on traditional methods found much to criticize. In particular, they complained about Fisher's dogmatism, the lack of proofs, the emphasis on small samples, and the difficulty of the book. However, a review by Harold Hotelling, which was submitted to the ''Journal of the American Statistical Association'' in 1927, did justice to Fisher's achievement. Hotelling stated in his review that "most books on statistics consist of pedagogic rehashes of identical material. This comfortably orthodox subject matter is absent from the volume under review, which summarizes for the reader the author's independent codification of statistical theory and some of his brilliant constributions to the subject, not all of which have previosuly been published".

Chapters

* Prefaces
# Introduction
# Diagrams
# Distributions
# Tests of Goodness of Fit, Independence and Homogeneity; with table of χ²
# Tests of Significance of Means, Difference of Means, and Regression Coefficients
# The Correlation Coefficient
# Intraclass Correlations and the Analysis of Variance
# Further Applications of the Analysis of Variance
* SOURCES USED FOR DATA AND METHODS INDEX

In the second edition of 1928 a chapter 9 was added: The Principles of Statistical Estimation.

See also

* '' The Design of Experiments''

Notes

*

Further reading

* The March 1951 issue of the ''Journal of the American Statistical Association'' contains articles celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first edition.
* A.W.F. Edwards (2005) "R. A. Fisher, Statistical Methods for Research Workers, 1925," in I. Grattan-Guinness (ed) ''Landmark Writings in Western Mathematics: Case Studies, 1640-1940,'' Amsterdam: Elsevier.
* {{Cite journal , last = Savage , first = Leonard J. , authorlink = Leonard Jimmie Savage , title = On Rereading R. A. Fisher , doi = 10.1214/aos/1176343456 , journal = Annals of Statistics , volume = 4 , issue = 3 , pages = 441–500 , year = 1976 , doi-access = free

Reviews

* Nature anonymous review of Fisher’s Statistical Method

* The BMJ, BMJ anonymous review of Fisher’s Statistical Method

* William Sealy Gosset, Student’
review of Fisher’s Statistical Methods
*Egon Pearson’
reviews of Fisher’s Statistical Methods
*Harold Hotelling’
review of Fishers’ Statistical Methods
* Leon Isserlis’
review of Fishers’ Statistical Methods
* W. P. Elderton�
review of Fisher’s Statistical Methods

External links

Text of first editionThe 14th edition (prepared from notes left by Fisher when he died in 1962) is reprinted as the first part of Statistical Methods, Experimental Design and Scientific Inference

History of probability and statistics
Statistics books
1925 non-fiction books