Quick Tip: How to Represent Confidence Intervals

While a discussion of what confidence intervals (CIs) are and when they are to be used is certainly relevant in a scientific discussion, this article is merely trying to establish how to properly represent CIs in a manuscript. Surprisingly, there is no real consensus on how CIs should be written. That said, here are some things to keep in mind and some of the best practices:

X (95% CI: A–B)

Sometimes you will see this represented as 95%CI, but we think the space between the terms is warranted.

X (95% CI: A–B)

The colon in this term is sometimes written as a comma. Either of these is fine.

X (95% CI: A–B)

There should not be any spaces between the numbers represented by A and B and the en dash. Depending on the data you may see X (95% CI: A, B), and that is correct as well (with a space between the comma and B).

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