Letter to the Editor

The recent paper by Zupan et al. [Zupan D, Srpcic J, Turk G. Characteristic value determination from small samples. Struct Safety 2007;29:268–78] computed the characteristic value for small samples arising from the normal, log–normal, Gumbel and the Weibull distributions. In the letter, we point out that many of the values reported in Zupan et al. (2007) are incorrect. A simple program is given for determining the characteristic value when its distribution is arbitrary. The program is written in R: a freely downloadable statistical software.