Statistical significance
This is a number indicating the probability that a given study result was not caused by chance. In other words, a result is called statistically significant if it is unlikely to have occurred by chance. The significance of a result is also called its p-value; the smaller the p-value, the more meaningful the result is. A p-value of under 5 percent (p <0.05) means that the result would occur by chance less than 5 percent of the time. A good example would be a simple coin flipping experiment. If you flip a coin 100 times and get tails 51 times, this result could obviously be due to chance and therefore would not be statistically significant. However, if you got tails 98 times, the odds of this happening by chance would be very, very small -- much less than 1%. This result would therefore be extremely statistically significant. A researcher who got these results would probably suspect that he was using some kind of trick or weighted coins.