topic Re: producing journal quality statistical tables in Statistical Procedures

producing journal quality statistical tables

iank131 — Thu, 23 May 2013 08:11:40 GMT

Hi,

My question is not so much about a statistical procedure as producing journal quality statistical tables using SAS output.

I have been using SAS for the past two years and everytime after manipulating my data and getting the results, producing good quality statistical tables is always a challenge. For example, using proc reg or proc GML to produce a journal quality statistical table is quite cumbersome. What I do now is when I get to this last stage of my empirical work, I switch to STATA and with little effort, I can produce a table that I can cut and paste into a word document for my paper.

I have searched on this forum and in the web for articles or discussions about this topic, but I don't seem to find anything. Am I missing something? Is SAS easy to use for producing journal quality statistical tables? Although I use ODS a little bit, I am certainly not an expert. At the moment, all my outputs are either excel or html using ODS, but they take a huge amount of editing to get to journal quality level.

Can someone enlighten me or pass me some links that talk about this issue.

Thanks

Ian.

Re: producing journal quality statistical tables

Rick_SAS — Thu, 23 May 2013 09:50:53 GMT

A nice overview of ODS graphicsis is in the papers at ODS Graphics and Graphing Technical Papers, with my favorite overview being

Rodriguez, (2011): http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/76822_ODSGraph2011.pdf

Some presentation tips are at http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings10/237-2010.pdf

You don't specify what your issue is, but I assume that you just want more control over teh output, including the ability to add titles, reference lines, and so forth. There are two apporaches:

1) For minor changes to ODS output from a procedure, use the ODS Graphics Editor (p. 9 of Rodriguez 2011). A step-by-step example is available at Change a plot title by using the ODS Graphics Editor - The DO Loop

2) For more complex designs, I tell the procedure to output the results, and then use SGPLOT or SGPANEL to create the graphic. Most procedures have an OUTPUT statement an OUT= data set, or some other way to output predicted values, residual values, etc. You can also get data directly from ODS graphics that are produced (see How to get data values out of ODS graphics - The DO Loop)

Give it a shot. If you can get part of the way, posting more details to this forum will help answer remaining issues.

Re: producing journal quality statistical tables

Jay54 — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:41:55 GMT

Can you clarify whether you are referring to the tabular output from various stat procedures or statistics tables inside the graphs.

Re: producing journal quality statistical tables

lvm — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:09:11 GMT

Using ODS one can create a table with almost any format and style you like. It does take a bit of time to learn the process. Here is a good explanation:

http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/forum2008/091-2008.pdf

Other helpful paper:

http://www.nesug.org/proceedings/nesug03/ad/ad001.pdf

Re: producing journal quality statistical tables

Rick_SAS — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:36:05 GMT

Sorry. My mind was read "graphics" but your words said "tables."