programme since it is fundamentally a spreadsheet tool and thus has an extremely limited range of statistical functions – and in any case these are not set out in a way that is well‐suited to clinical research.
WRITING PAPERS FOR CLINICAL JOURNALS
Those of you who envisage writing up your research and submitting a paper to a clinical journal may find the following web site addresses (URLs) useful. They contain detailed advice and instructions to authors on what is required prior to submission: for example, how to contact the journal, what should be in the paper (order and content of sections), information on the required style, editorial policies and guidelines, and so on.
The first URL directs you towards a set of instructions to authors for each of over 3500 health and life‐sciences journals, worldwide. The second and third URLs relate specifically to the British Medical Journal, but contain a huge amount of detailed and splendidly informative material related to the preparation and submission of clinical papers, and collectively provide a set of desirable standards which anyone who is contemplating the submission of such a paper to the BMJ or any other journal should aspire to.
http://bmj.bmjournals.com/advice
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/advice/article_submissiom.shtml
David Bowers, Allan House, and David Owens School of Medicine, University of Leeds,
Autumn, 2005
Preface to the Third Edition
It seems to us quite a long time since the second edition of Understanding Clinical Papers was published (in 2005). In the intervening years we have again (as we did for the previous editions) received from readers many favourable comments, as well as some useful suggestions. One suggestion that struck us as being eminently sensible, coinciding with our own thoughts, was that we should introduce material into the book which would help readers understand clinical papers with a qualitative design. Such papers are increasingly seen in the mainstream clinical journals (in addition of course to the specialist qualitative journals) and we feel that we should be providing readers with some help in making sense of this content.
The inclusion of five new chapters containing this qualitative material is the most important change in our book from the second edition. We are very pleased to have been able to welcome an experienced qualitative researcher as a co‐author, who has contributed this new material.
In addition, we have, not surprisingly, taken the opportunity to update many of the examples of clinical papers with which we illustrate the ideas contained throughout the book. At the same time, we have sharpened and clarified the text were we felt it was needed. We have added small amounts of new material here and there – where we felt that these additions, drawn from our familiarity with the evolving health research literature, would improve the book.
The book should appeal, as before, to doctors, nurses, health visitors, physiotherapists, radiographers, dietitians, speech therapists, health educators and promoters, podiatrists, and all of those other allied professionals (and students in each of these disciplines) – and to all of those involved in health research.
David Bowers, Bridgette Bewick, Allan House, and David Owens
Leeds, 2013
Preface to the Fourth Edition
The third edition of this book was published in 2013: that's seven years ago! We are thankful that all of the previous editions were so well liked, and that we received so many favourable comments from readers. But seven years is a long time and we have felt for a while that the book needed refreshing to take into account readers’ suggestions and our own feelings about the potential for improvements. As a consequence, this fourth edition has been extensively revised and extended. The changes include four completely new chapters:
Studies of Complex Interventions.
Systematic Review of Qualitative Studies.
Research Using Already‐Collected Data. This new chapter will include material on missing data, confounding by indication, and other relevant topics.
Poisson Regression.
At the same time every other chapter has been extensively revised, and with much new material added, on, for example, the difference between clinical and statistical significance; reservations about the p‐value; the consequences of multiple testing and methods of correction; nested case–control studies; feasibility and pilot studies; cluster randomized trials; stratified random allocation; adaptive trial designs; sub‐group analysis; standardized guidelines for writing trials and reviews; and much more. In addition, we have improved the text throughout where we thought this would lead to better understanding. Importantly, we have also updated a great many of the examples from the literature.
As before, this edition of our book should appeal to all of those professionals involved in clinical work who wish to improve their understanding of the research literature.
David Bowers, Allan House, David Owens, and Bridgette Bewick
Leeds 2020
CHAPTER 1 Some Preliminaries
Before you start reading a paper, you could usefully ask one or two questions which help set the work in context:
Who wrote the paper?
In what sort of journal does the paper appear?
Who (and what) is acknowledged?
WHO WROTE THE PAPER?
Often, one person writes an article such as a review or an editorial. This is less common for papers describing the results of a research study. Because most research is a joint enterprise, papers describing research studies are usually published under the names of a number of people – the research team. From the list of authors, you can tell:
The range of expertise of the research team. Professional backgrounds of the authors (and sometimes their level of seniority) are often included, with the address of each.
The research centre or centres involved in the study. This is useful when you've been reading for a while and you know whose work to look out for – for whatever reason!
The principal researcher. He or she is often named first, or sometimes identifiable as the only author whose full address and contact details are listed (called the corresponding author).
Figure 1.1 shows a typical example of a research project that
