research Criticisms Under specious pressure from Fisher, Barnard retracted his test in a published paper, however many researchers prefer Barnard’s exact test over Fisher's exact test for analyzing contingency tables, since its statistics are more powerful for the vast majority of experimental designs, whereas Fisher’s exact test statistics are conservative, meaning the significance shown by its values are too high, leading the experimenter to dismiss as insignificant results that would be statistically significant using the less conservative double-binomial statistics of Barnard's tests rather than the hypergeometric statistics of Fisher's exact test. Barnard's tests are not appropriate in the rare case of an experimental design that constrains both marginal results (e.g. ‘taste tests’); although rare, experimentally imposed constraints on both marginal totals makes the true sampling distribution for the table hypergeometric. Barnard's test can be applied to larger tables, but the computation time increases and the power advantage quickly decreases. It remains unclear which test statistic is preferred when implementing Barnard's test; however, most test statistics yield uniformly more powerful tests than Fisher's exact test. See also Fisher's exact test Boschloo's test Footnotes References External links Statistical tests for contingency tables