Effect-Size Converter
Papers report effects in different currencies: Cohen's d here, r there, η² in the ANOVA table, odds ratios in the medical journals. Type any one of them and get all the others, plus the thing benchmarks can't give you — a picture of what that effect actually looks like.
How to read the numbers
- Cohen's d is the group difference in standard-deviation units, and the most portable currency for two-group comparisons.
- r / η². Effect as (squared) correlation: the share of outcome variance the effect explains. The d ↔ r conversion here assumes two equal-sized groups.
- Cohen's f is what ANOVA (and G*Power) asks for; for two groups f = d/2.
- Odds ratio. The logistic world's currency. The conversion (d = ln OR × √3⁄π) is an approximation, so treat it as a ballpark, not an identity.
U₃ and P(superiority) are the plain-language versions: what fraction of the treatment group beats the control average, and how often a random treated person beats a random control person.
| Benchmark (Cohen, 1988) | d | r | η² |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small | 0.20 | .10 | .01 |
| Medium | 0.50 | .24 | .06 |
| Large | 0.80 | .37 | .14 |
Benchmarks are a last resort. Cohen himself said so. A "small" d = 0.2 on mortality is enormous; a "large" d = 0.8 on a reaction-time task might be trivia. Compare an effect to others in its own literature; the numbers above are for when you have nothing else. The full story lives in the Effect Size & Power lesson.