Some Stats & Epi Links for Medical Students & Clinicians

Resources from the British Medical Journal

• Statistics at Square One.
  1. Data display and summary
  2. Mean and standard deviation
  3. Populations and samples
  4. Statements of probability and confidence intervals
  5. Differences between means: Type I and Type II errors and power
  6. Differences between percentages and paired alternatives
  7. The t-tests
  8. The chi-squared tests
  9. Exact probability test
  10. Rank score tests
  11. Correlation and regression
  12. Survival analysis
  13. Study design and choosing a statistical test
• BMJ Books
  • Statistics at Square One.
  • Epidemiology for the Uninitiated.
  • How to read a paper.
• Statistics Notes. A series of short articles on the use of statistics in the medical literature (edited by Doug Altman, Cancer Research UK, and Martin Bland, University of York).
• Topic Collections.

Articles authored or co-authored by David L. Streiner

• Maintaining Standards: Differences between the Standard Deviation and Standard Error, and When to Use Each.
• Breaking Up is Hard to Do: The Heartbreak of Dichotomizing Continuous Data.
• What’s Under the ROC? An Introduction to Receiver Operating Characteristics Curves.

Resources from the Canadian Medical Association Journal

• Basic Statistics for Clinicians.
  1. Hypothesis testing.
  2. Interpreting study results: confidence intervals.
  3. Assessing the effects of treatment: measures of association.
  4. Correlation and regression.

Online Calculators

• Stats Calculator from University of Toronto's Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. It includes the following options:
  • Diagnostic Test - calculates the Sensitivity, Specificity, PPV, NPV, LR+, and LR-
  • Prospective Study - calculates the Relative Risk (RR), Absolute Relative Risk (ARR), and Number Needed to Treat (NNT)
  • Case-control Study - calculates the Odds Ratio (OR)
  • Randomized Control Trial (RCT) - calculates the Relative Risk Reduction (RRR), ARR, and NNT
• John Pezzullo's Interactive Statistical Calculation Pages. This is a great site with lots of links to good online calculators.
• GraphPad's QuickCalcs page--another site with some very nice calculators.

Other Resources

• Errata and clarifications for Biostatistics: The Bare Essentials, 2nd Edition. Note that in more recent printings of the 2nd Edition than I have, some of these problems may have been fixed.
• Jerry Dallal's Little Handbook of Statistical Practice.
• Health statistics Tools of the Trade. Statistical Measurements, Data Analysis, Charts and Graphs, and Data Collection/Processing.
• Robert Wolfe's notes on confounding and effect modification.
• The "what-is" series from Evidence-based medicine.

Last modified on 24-Oct-2008.

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