With this best-selling text as your guide, you'll discover a concise, stepwise program that will help you evaluate clinical studies, identify flaws in study design, interpret statistics, and apply evidence from clinical research to your practice.
Sharpen your analytical skills with these insightful features...
Step-by-step approach ideal for both students and practitioners guides you through the health research literature, showing you the ingredients that go into a meaningful study, clues to potential study flaws, and ways to apply solid evidence in clinical practice. Uniform framework uses a simple six-point framework based on the mnemonic M.A.A.R.I.E. You will learn to evaluate studies in terms of Methods, Assignment, Assessment, Results, Interpretation, and Extrapolation. Hypothetical illustrations demonstrate the limitations of today's published studies. Unique learning aids?including question checklists, scenarios illustrating study design, and flaw-catching exercises?help you reinforce key facts and retain what you've learned.
NEW to the Fifth Edition...
New "Guide to the Guidelines" section helps you make sense of established and emerging clinical guidelines, and helps you understand the role of these guidelines in practice. Current information on outcomes includes discussions of safety and of the effects of interactions on outcomes. More graphic presentation of statistics helps make complex concepts easy to grasp and apply using a flowchart of statistics. StudyingaStudy.com Website is an integral feature of this edition providing interactive materials for all sections of the book. The Website provides practice using the M.A.A.R.I.E. framework, interactive flaw-catching and Selecting a Statistics exercises, self-testing questions-answers and exercises using abstracts from real articles. Courses and Journal Clubs can now use Studying a Study and Testing a Test with the help of a special section of the Website.
Clear the path to a new understanding of evidence-based medicine...and integrate today's best evidence into tomorrow's practice. Order your copy of Studying a Study and Testing a Test, Fifth Edition today!
In a way, this book is a traditional book on research methods turned upside down. Instead of telling the researcher how to do and report a study, this book tells the reader how to apply such knowledge in determining the quality of a medical paper. As such it is well written, clear and relevant.
I would like to suggest, however, that research methods are always depending on a views in the philosophy of science. (Courses in the Philosophy of Medicine are becoming more and more important in the education of Doctors). As an example of a well received book I can mention "Philosophy of Medicine. An Introduction" by Henrik R. Wulff, Stig Andur Pedersen & Raben Rosenberg (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1986). Knowledge of this kind should enable the reader to read and interpret the medical literature at a still higher level. (It is of course more difficult to write easy "how to read books" based on such a more theoretical and philosophical level compared to the more statistical and methodical level).
There exists a broader literature on "Clinical reasoning in the health Professions" (Higgs et al), "Medical semiotics" (Baer et al.), diverse philosophical studies of medicine, "Quality in science" and much more. It would be interesting if anyone would try to expose how such knowledge could be turned upside down as guide on how to read the medical literature on a still deeper level.
It is my claim that a general background in philosophy and science studies should provide readers with even better qualifications to read the scientific literature. This is not an extraordinary position. In Denmark courses in the philosophy of science are very popular, and just now are we discussing to make such courses compulsory in all university studies.
