Statistics help needed

[Surreybirder]

I'm working on a paper for my county bird report.
I've worked out the correlation coefficients between various sets of data and now I need to work out whether or not they are statistically significant (p-test). I cannot find the formula for the p-test on Google, despite a lot of searching. Could anyone point me in the right direction (or send me the formula), please?
(I'm correlating various people's data on the number of different species observed each month in their chosen study tetrads. It's interesting how much variance there is, even within a small county like Surrey. Even year-on-year in my own tetrad the correlation does not seem to be as great as one might expect. Which is one reason that birding is so fascinating, I guess!)

[robinm]

Hi. I would normally use the the t test to test the significance of a correlation coefficient. The method can be found here (http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/collections/statsbk/11.shtml)

If you need any more help let me know.

[cuckooroller]

I'm working on a paper for my county bird report.
I've worked out the correlation coefficients between various sets of data and now I need to work out whether or not they are statistically significant (p-test). I cannot find the formula for the p-test on Google, despite a lot of searching. Could anyone point me in the right direction (or send me the formula), please?
(I'm correlating various people's data on the number of different species observed each month in their chosen study tetrads. It's interesting how much variance there is, even within a small county like Surrey. Even year-on-year in my own tetrad the correlation does not seem to be as great as one might expect. Which is one reason that birding is so fascinating, I guess!)


Surreybirder,

Don't know if any of these will help but here's a few links.

http://www.google.com/help/calculator.html
http://www.wku.edu/~david.neal/statistics/hyptest/ptest.html
http://www.surveysystem.com/signif.htm
http://www.statpac.com/statistics-calculator/

Steve

[Surreybirder]

Thanks, Steve,
I don't think these sites answer my specific question (at least, not without forking out $40!). But I'm sure it's out there on the web somewhere!

[mcdowella]

If you start from http://members.aol.com/johnp71/javastat.html you may end up at http://department.obg.cuhk.edu.hk/researchsupport/Correlation_coeff.asp Note that other parts of this web site request that you mention it when you publish your results. Many books in statistics dealing with the Correlation coefficient have tables at the back. Example: the BTO Guide Statistics for Ornithologists.

You can get an excellent free statistics package from http://www.r-project.org/: this is used and maintained by Statistics academics - but it does take a while to set up and get used to - you will probably end up buying $40 on textbooks about the related S system to get used to it.