Outcome of the public consultation on the draft guidance on statistical reporting

The EFSA has undertaken a public consultation on the draft guidance on statistical reporting. The draft guidance was prepared by a dedicated working group.  The task of the working group  is to improve quality, openness and transparency of EFSA’s work and information/analyses received by EFSA (including dossiers). It is not intended to provide guidance on which statistical methodology should be applied and how statistical analysis should be performed. A template was proposed, that covers in the broadest possible way, the reporting of relevant aspects of a statistical analysis including: objectives, sources of information (data), study design, data quality, analysis methods, results and interpretation. The guidance and template serve to harmonise and standardise statistical reporting to allow for reproducibility of results and to facilitate independent peer review. The draft version presented the intermediate results after the first half of the project. The public consultation was launched on 28 May 2014 and closed on 23 July2014. The comments provided insight into several potential difficulties in the text of the draft guidance and thus, enhanced the quality of the document. The relevant comments were taken into account and the guidance document was revised accordingly. The Working Group on guidance on statistical reporting acknowledges the usefulness and quality of the comments received and would like to thank all commentators for their interest and input to its current and future work. EFSA has committed to publish a technical report on the outcome of the public consultation on the guidance and presents hereafter the responses of the working group to the comments it received.