None of this is assumed on the course. Use it afterwards, or when a topic catches you.
Epidemiology textbooks
| Bonita R, Beaglehole R, Kjellström T. Basic Epidemiology, 2nd ed. WHO, 2006. Free PDF |
You want one short book covering everything this course does. Written for a global audience and free. |
| Webb P, Bain C, Page A. Essential Epidemiology, 4th ed. Cambridge, 2019. |
You want a full textbook with exercises. The clearest of the standard undergraduate texts. |
| Rothman KJ. Epidemiology: An Introduction, 2nd ed. Oxford, 2012. |
You want the reasoning rather than the recipes. Short, and unusually honest about what the methods cannot do. |
| Rothman KJ, Greenland S, Lash TL. Modern Epidemiology, 4th ed. Wolters Kluwer, 2021. |
You are going further into methods. This is the reference, not an introduction. |
| Pearce N. A Short Introduction to Epidemiology, 2nd ed. 2005. Free PDF |
You want the course’s own framing. Written by one of the faculty. |
Papers worth an hour
| Grimes DA, Schulz KF. An overview of clinical research: the lay of the land. Lancet 2002;359:57–61. |
Every study design in 5 pages. The clearest thing written on the subject. |
| Delgado-Rodríguez M, Llorca J. Bias. J Epidemiol Community Health 2004;58:635–41. |
A catalogue of biases with an example of each. |
| Greenland S et al. Statistical tests, P values, confidence intervals, and power: a guide to misinterpretations. Eur J Epidemiol 2016;31:337–50. |
25 ways to misread a p-value, each corrected. Read it before you write a results section. |
| Gigerenzer G et al. Helping doctors and patients make sense of health statistics. Psychol Sci Public Interest 2007;8:53–96. |
Why absolute risks communicate and relative risks mislead. |
| Doll R, Hill AB. Smoking and carcinoma of the lung. BMJ 1950;2:739–48. |
The case-control study that started modern epidemiology. The reasoning is all on the surface. |
| Hill AB. The environment and disease: association or causation? Proc R Soc Med 1965;58:295–300. |
The 9 viewpoints, from the man who wrote them. Shorter and more careful than its reputation. |
Reporting guidelines
Use the one that matches your design, from the first day of the study rather than the week before submission.
| Observational (cohort, case-control, cross-sectional) |
STROBE |
| Randomised trial |
CONSORT |
| Systematic review |
PRISMA |
| Routinely collected data |
RECORD |
| Diagnostic accuracy |
STARD |
| Prediction model |
TRIPOD |
The EQUATOR Network indexes all of them.
R
| Wickham H, Çetinkaya-Rundel M, Grolemund G. R for Data Science, 2nd ed. Free online |
You want the standard tidyverse book. Start at the Data Transformation chapter. |
| The Epidemiologist R Handbook. Free online |
You want recipes for outbreak and surveillance work, written by field epidemiologists. The most directly useful R book for this audience. |
| Kabacoff R. R in Action, 3rd ed. Manning, 2022. |
You come from SPSS or Stata and want base R as well as the tidyverse. |
| Posit cheatsheets |
You want one printable page per package. |
| Wickham H. ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. Free online |
You want to understand the grammar rather than copy plots. |
Quarto and reproducibility
| Quarto documentation |
You want the reference. The Authoring section is the part you need first. |
| The Turing Way |
You want the case for reproducible research, and the practices that deliver it. |
| Wilson G et al. Good enough practices in scientific computing. PLoS Comput Biol 2017;13:e1005510. |
You want a realistic minimum rather than a counsel of perfection. |
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