Preface
Much has happened since the 1st edition of Presenting Medical Statistics from Proposal to Publication was published in 2007. Most obviously, we have increased authors so that now we are three! We’re so pleased that Ray Balise from the USA has joined us in making this 2nd edition bigger and better than the 1st and making it truly international. Ray had the inspiration to grow the book to include SAS, SAS University Edition, and R, as well as Stata and SPSS to meet the changing needs and practices of researchers. Our new edition retains the underlying flavour of the 1st in being example led, and showing how to undertake statistical analyses and how to report them. An added ingredient is the inclusion of code and datasets for all analyses shown in the book on our website.
Readers of the 1st edition will notice that we don’t include every analysis in all statistical packages– there wouldn’t be space to do this. But instead we include one in the book, with each example being available on our website in all packages. We have updated where needed and added information on data protection and security in the USA as well as the UK. We have added a new chapter on meta- analysis.
We have retained the preface to the 1st edition as we still want to record our thanks to our many colleagues who have provided help in the form of data, examples, and/ or general, much- appreciated support. In this edition we have some new people to thank: our heads of departments, who have supported us: Charles Wolfe (King’s College London), Sandra Eldridge (Queen Mary University of London), and J. Sunil Rao (University of Miami) and also Phil Lavori and Alice Whittemore (Stanford). We thank Tim Peters, who kindly located and sent us the original data for figures 13.3 and 13.4, John Williams for permission to reproduce the pain meta- analyses, and Victoria Cornelius for the data dictionary example. Special thanks are needed for Justin Lock (King’s), who spent many hours getting the screen shots into the right format for publishing and to Diane Morrison for help with production and proofing. We are grateful for all the support and patience shown to us by OUP staff, particularly Fiona Richardson.
Most of all we are grateful to our partners, Eric Peacock, Graham Kerry, and Lori Balise for all their encouragement and help. Very sadly, Graham died before we finished and so we dedicate this book to him.