Note. As an earlier version of this page was originally created exclusively for use by undergraduate medical students of the University of Edinburgh (UoE), some content refers to how to access textbooks via the UoE libraries. This information will be retained for the convenience of persons registered with the UoE. 

 

Beginners Guides to Medical Statistics and Biostatistics

 

**: Highly recommended, *: Recommended

**Petrie, A. & Sabin, C., Medical Statistics at a Glance,  4th ed., Blackwell Publishing Ltd., Oxford.  The electronic version of the book ‘Medical Statistics at a Glance’ can be accessed via a title search on the Edinburgh University Library catalogue via the link http://catalogue.lib.ed.ac.uk

 

* The Electronic Statistics Textbook is rather useful if you wish to do some background reading on a statistical procedure before moving on to perform statistical analyses on your own data. A search engine is provided to help you.

Reporting the Statistical Findings of a Study

It is important to know what from your SPSS output is relevant and necessary to report and how it should be reported. The following resource is worth consulting for help in this area:

Presenting the Findings and Conclusions of Statistical Hypothesis Tests.

Reporting the Statistical Findings of a StudyExploring a range of statistical hypothesis procedures and more using 

A key challenge in recommending a good textbook for analysing statistical data using R is that R code is very frequently updated, causing previous code to become outdated. This issue also makes the provision of R code for the very many statistical procedures presented on StatsforMedics impracticable and unsustainable. Nevertheless, at the time of writing (November 2023) and further to some research, I can provide the following book recommendations:

Introductory Statistics with R
by Peter Dalgaard

The book is available for free for users with institutional access, which includes students at the University of Edinburgh.

Please refer to the screenshot here from the University’s DiscoverEd catalogue highlighting a book, The R Book, which was recently revamped by a few of my colleagues. If you have an interest in identifying a suitable reference for further graph work in R, you may find it worthwhile reviewing chapters 5 and 6. It is important to note, though, that the content of this book is generally well beyond the level encountered by Year 2 MBChB students at ‘Edinburgh’, but I am assuming that some students will have an interest in further developing their coding skills.

 

 

Useful Textbooks: Electronic Copies by Margaret MacDougall is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.