The Education Corner: updates on new and established core concepts and methods in epidemiology
Year: 2012
Type: editorial
Abstract: Do you have that sinking feeling that you are lagging behind? Your bright young PhD student says she has drawn a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) and now asks for your views on the likelihood of having collider bias and whether there are any backdoor paths that need to be considered. Reeling from this you are assaulted by a less bright student who has got his instrumental variables muddled with his latent variables. Seeking relief you open the February issue of the IJE only to find that there is now two-stage Mendelian Randomization,1 and you have only just got the hang of basic Mendelian Randomization. And worse, it is full of epigenetics,2 which confusingly seems to contradict what you have learned from TIME magazine.3 Relax. With this issue of the IJE we launch a new section, ‘The Education Corner’. The purpose of this section is to provide concise updates and reviews of epidemiological concepts and methods suitable for educational use. We will select relevant topics ranging from study design and implementation to data analyses and offer short descriptions of new developments, appropriate applications and common pitfalls. This section does not aim to be a series of articles constituting an introduction to epidemiology like those previously supplied by the Lancet4 or to replace an introductory or advanced textbook in epidemiology. Instead, we will present selected topics that are not adequately covered in epidemiology textbooks or we may take a new perspective on older topics. We aim to provide a service to the epidemiology community in making relevant methodological topics accessible, transparent and easily understood.
DOI: 10.1093/ije/dys050
Authors: K. B. Michels, R. Saracci, J. Lynch, N. Pearce
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics and Probability
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2154225684