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PHARMACEUTICAL STATISTICS
Pharmaceut. Statist. 2003; 2: 229–233 (DOI:10.1002/pst.072)
Book Reviews
This section of the journal is designed to inform you about
books that have been published recently in the area of
pharmaceutical statistics. We aim to provide reviews of books
that are specifically about the theory and application of
statistics in the pharmaceutical sector, though we will accept
reviews of statistical books that are relevant to a wider
audience. We will cover new books or substantially new
editions, and will include both those aimed at statisticians and
those intended to inform scientists about Statistics. As an
example of the latter, in this issue is a review of a book with the
same name as the journal, which we certainly could not resist!
Any reader of Pharmaceutical Statistics may offer to review
any suitable book. This may be either because they are already
familiar with the material and wish to provide a summary and
advice useful for other readers, or because they are interested in
the material and would like to look at it with the production of
a review as impetus. The reviewer will be able to keep the book,
as long as they complete the review in a reasonable time. Please
contact Peter Lane (at [email protected]) to offer to review
a book, to suggest someone else who might be interested in
reviewing a book, or to suggest further books that should be
reviewed. You can find a list of books already suggested for
review on the PSI website at http://www.psiweb.org/resources/
resources.asp?parentfolderid=252&subgroup id=4 and this in-
cludes information about the current status of reviews. This list
is updated approximately monthly, and is published quarterly
in SPIN, the newsletter of the PSI.
For a single book, we suggest aiming for 500 to 1000 words.
However, the content is more important than the length. We
would like to see the coverage of the book described sufficiently
so that people are clear what they will find in it, and the level or
intended audience made clear. We particularly want your
opinion on the relevance, clarity and presentation of the
material in the book. We are happy to consider a combined
review of two or more related books – as for the four books on
Six Sigma reviewed in the first issue of Vol. 1 – or a comparative
review of books on the same subject.
Peter Lane
Statistical Methods for the Analysis of Repeated Measurements
Davis CS (2002)
ISBN 0387953701; 415 pages; £59.50, h84.95, $79.95
Springer; http://www.springer.de/cgi/svcat/search book.pl?isbn=
0387953701
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to a wide
variety of statistical methods for the analysis of repeated
measurements. It is aimed primarily as a textbook based on a
number of semester-length graduate and short courses that the
author has been running since 1991. As such, the general style
of presenting the theory on a new topic with subsequent worked
examples and homework questions at the end of each chapter
works well. The examples and exercises are based on 80 data
sets from real applications which are available from the
publisher’s website. For the average practising pharmaceutical
statistician I felt that there was generally too much theory with
limited discussion of practical issues compared to other books
on longitudinal data analysis.
I agree with the author’s recommendation that a background
in mathematical statistics, regression and ANOVA would be
useful, along with knowledge of generalized linear models
(GLMs).
Although the focus of the book is on methods that can be
implemented in standard software packages and not on current
research areas, the author chose not to include program code or
analysis output, presenting only key results throughout the
examples. The availability of the data sets and course material,
which includes some SAS code and output on the website, will
be beneficial, with a bit of additional effort, to those with
sufficient time to work through some of the examples and
exercises.
The coverage of various classical and newer methods for
continuous and categorical outcome variables in one book was
a major strength. As a source for further reading, the discussion
on alternatives and extensions to the main approaches was
valuable. Also, the common theme of discussing the rationale
Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
BOOK REVIEWS
