Writing and Publishing Scientific Articles
8-28
Subject Characteristic Tables
Clinical papers often include a table showing characteristics of study groups. Following is an example of such a table. Note that the units (in bold) appear in the row stubs.
Table 19. Baseline characteristics of patients in the 2 study subgroups
Group A (n = 48)
Group B (n = 52)
Characteristic Men, no. (%)
24 (50)
30 (58)
Mean age (SD), years
47.8 (17.7)
50.8 (16.6)
Tumor classification, no. (%) T1 T2 T3 Histologic subtype, no. (%) Adenocarcinoma Squamous cell carcinoma Other
20 (42) 15 (31) 13 (27) 10 (21) 20 (42) 18 (38)
18 (35) 24 (46) 10 (19) 12 (23) 26 (50) 14 (27)
As in the above example, sometimes the units for almost all the rows in a table are “no. (%).” When this is the case, you can use a footnote to indicate this and thus streamline the “Characteristic” column. When you use this footnote option, it is often helpful to place the other units of measure in the table cells rather than in the row stubs so that readers can easily distinguish between the cells indicating “no. (%)” and the c ells with different units of measure. For example, the above table could be reformatted as follows (changes are in bold):
Table 20. Baseline characteristics of patients in the 2 study subgroups*
Group A (n = 48)
Group B (n = 52)
Characteristic
Men
24 (50)
30 (58)
Mean age (SD)
47.8 yr (17.7 yr )
50.8 yr (16.6 yr )
Tumor classification T1 T2 T3
20 (42) 15 (31) 13 (27) 10 (21) 20 (42) 18 (38)
18 (35) 24 (46) 10 (19) 12 (23) 26 (50) 14 (27)
Histologic subtype Adenocarcinoma Squamous cell carcinoma Other
* Values are numbers of patients (percentages) unless otherwise indicated.
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