To practice evidence-based medicine, doctors need to understand how research is conducted and be able to critically appraise research evidence. A sound understanding of medical statistics is essential for the correct evaluation of medical research and the appropriate implementation of findings in clinical practice.
Written in an easily accessible style, the Oxford Handbook of Medical Statistics provides doctors and medical students with a concise and thorough account of this often difficult subject. It promotes understanding and interpretation of statistical methods across a wide range of topics, from study design and sample size considerations, through t- and chi-squared tests, to complex multifactor analyses, using examples from published research. References for further reading are given for more information on specific topics.
Helping readers to conduct their own research or critically appraise other's work, this volume provides all the information readers need to understand and interpret medical statistics.

1. Research design
2. Collecting data
3. Handling the data: what steps are important
4. Presenting research findings
5. Choosing and using statistical software for analysing data
6. Summarising data
7. Probability and distributions
8. Statistical tests
9. Diagnostic studies
10. Other statistical methods
11. Analysing multiple observations per subject
12. Analysing multiple variables per subject
13. Meta-analysis
14. Bayesian statistics
15. Glossary