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Buy this book if you are a health‐care professional and you want some guidance in understanding the clinical research literature. It is designed to help you with reading research papers, by explaining their structure and the vocabulary they use. These essential first steps will make interpretation of clinical research that much easier for you. For example, the book will help with questions like:

Who were the authors, what is their standing, and can they be trusted?

What question or questions did they want to answer, and what was the clinical importance of doing so?

Who were the subjects in the study, how were they chosen, and were the methods used the most suitable?

How were the data collected? Was this the best approach?

What methods did the authors use to analyse the data, and were the methods employed appropriate?

What did they find? Were their conclusions consistent with their results?

Were there any shortcomings in the study? Do the authors acknowledge them?

What are the clinical implications of their results?

Does it all make sense?

This book is not an introduction to medical statistics, study design, epidemiology, systematic reviews, evidence‐based medicine, or critical appraisal, although we inevitably touch on all of these things (and more). Even so, if you are not already well versed in some of these fields, you should know a lot more by the time you get to the end.

We have concentrated on improving our readers’ understanding of quantitative research papers, and while qualitative papers contain several important elements which we have not been able to cover here, there are many other areas, particularly at the beginning and ends of papers, which readers of qualitative papers will find relevant to their needs.

Primarily, this book should be of interest to the following individuals:

 Clinicians currently practising. This would include GPs, doctors in hospitals, in the community and in public health, nurses, midwives, health visitors, health educators and promoters, physiotherapists, dietitians, chiropodists, speech therapists, radiographers, pharmacists, and other clinically‐related specialists;

 Clinicians of all types engaged in research activities: as part of their training; as a condition of their clinical duties; for postgraduate studies and courses; or for professional qualifications.

 Those involved with the education and training of health professionals in colleges of health, in universities, and in in‐house training and research departments.

 College, undergraduate, and postgraduate students in all medical and clinical disciplines which involve any element of research methods, medical statistics, epidemiology, critical appraisal, clinical effectiveness, evidence‐based medicine, and the like.

In addition, this book should appeal to individuals who although are not themselves clinicians but nonetheless find themselves in a clinical setting, and need some understanding of what the published clinical research in their area means. These people would include:

 Clinical auditors and quality assessors

 Clinical managers

 Service managers, administrators, and planners

 Those working in health authorities and in local government social and health departments

 Purchasers of health provision.

 People not actually employed in a clinical arena but who nonetheless have a professional or personal interest in the medical literature; for example, members of self‐help and support groups (e.g. migraine, stroke, diabetes, Alzheimer's, etc.); medical journalists; research‐fund‐providers; the educated, interested, lay public.

We have structured the contents of the book into a series of units whose sequence mirrors that of papers in most of the better‐quality journals. Thus we start with the preliminaries (title, authors, institution, journal type and status, and so on) and end with the epilogue (discussion, conclusions, and clinical implications). Throughout the book we have used a wide variety of extracts from recently published papers to illuminate our textual comments. In these we have focussed largely, but not solely, on examples of good practice in the hope that this will provide readers with some ‘how it should be done’ benchmarks. Any errors remain, of course, our own.

David Bowers, Allan House, and David Owens

Leeds, 2000