Methodological Errors in Medical Research

There is little evidence that an understanding of sound research methods has been used for clinical research and many papers are published which contain methodological flaws and errors. For the past 30 years the author has collected examples of published papers with such errors. He has used these in the teaching of postgraduate courses as a way of making theoretical statistical concepts memorable for participants. This book touches on such fields as experimental design, randomized trials, screening, evaluation of diagnostic tests, clinical epidemiology and statistics. Each example provided is followed by a brief discussion of the principal errors committed.