The last section of the book then looks at all of these in terms of more complex real life examples from clinical papers reproduced with permission of the various journals – I thought this final section really helped with the understanding of difficult clinical trials. Then it works through confidence intervals, P values, t-tests and other parametric tests including chi-square tests right through to statistics which compare risk such as odds ratios, correlation, regression and survival statistics such as Kaplan-Meier plots and the Cox regression model. The book starts with simple statistics such as percentages, mean, median, mode and standard deviation. I would have to say that they have succeeded in their goal. The authors see their target audience as dividing into those who just want to be able to explain statistics in a viva situation, those who have to analyse a paper and those who are planning a research project. This care and attention means it’s possible just to dip into this book if you want to check some facts or you can read through it at a deeper level if you are planning out a research paper. Each topic in the book is then described using the same headers throughout: I really quite enjoyed this book – a lot of time and effort has gone into taking the fear out of statistics for the reader which makes it a pleasure to read.Ī grading system of stars and “thumbs up” is used to denote how important and how technically difficult each topic is.
