Did you read the help for cor.test? Test statistics, references.... looks pretty complete to me. If the descriptions are too terse, then the references given would be the next step.
Sarah Excerpted from ?cor.test If 'method' is '"pearson"', the test statistic is based on Pearson's product moment correlation coefficient 'cor(x, y)' and follows a t distribution with 'length(x)-2' degrees of freedom if the samples follow independent normal distributions. If there are at least 4 complete pairs of observation, an asymptotic confidence interval is given based on Fisher's Z transform. If 'method' is '"kendall"' or '"spearman"', Kendall's tau or Spearman's rho statistic is used to estimate a rank-based measure of association. These tests may be used if the data do not necessarily come from a bivariate normal distribution. For Kendall's test, by default (if 'exact' is NULL), an exact p-value is computed if there are less than 50 paired samples containing finite values and there are no ties. Otherwise, the test statistic is the estimate scaled to zero mean and unit variance, and is approximately normally distributed. For Spearman's test, p-values are computed using algorithm AS 89. References: D. J. Best & D. E. Roberts (1975), Algorithm AS 89: The Upper Tail Probabilities of Spearman's rho. _Applied Statistics_, *24*, 377-379. Myles Hollander & Douglas A. Wolfe (1973), _Nonparametric Statistical Methods._ New York: John Wiley & Sons. Pages 185-194 (Kendall and Spearman tests). On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 5:37 AM, mentor_ <ment...@gmx.net> wrote: > > Hi, > > I am not sure which test is applied to the data if you use cor.test(x, y) ? > Is it an unpaired t-Test? > > > Regards -- Sarah Goslee http://www.functionaldiversity.org ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.