Abstract
Doug Altman was a visionary leader and one of the most influential medical statisticians of the last 40 years. Based on a presentation in the "Invited session in memory of Doug Altman" at the 40th Annual Conference of the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics (ISCB) in Leuven, Belgium and our long-standing collaborations with Doug, we discuss his contributions to regression modeling, reporting, prognosis research, as well as some more general issues while acknowledging that we cannot cover the whole spectrum of Doug's considerable methodological output. His statement "To maximize the benefit to society, you need to not just do research but do it well" should be a driver for all researchers. To improve current and future research, we aim to summarize Doug's messages for these three topics.
Highlights
Doug Altman, who passed away on June 3, 2018, was one of the most influential medical statisticians of the past 40 years
In 1994, he published an editorial in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) entitled “The scandal of poor medical research – we need less research, better research and research done for the right reasons” (Altman, 1994)
Doug was the one of the first to review the statistical methods used in medical journals
Summary
Doug Altman, who passed away on June 3, 2018, was one of the most influential medical statisticians of the past 40 years. There were earlier articles about the poor quality of methodology and reporting in medical research, and Doug’s editorial appeared at the same time as many other critical papers. Several published tributes give more detail than we could possibly manage here (Collins, 2019; Deeks et al, 2018; Evans, 2018, Matthews, Chalmers, & Rothwell, 2018; Rennie, 2019; Trivella, 2019; Watts, 2018) He was a pioneer of many novel statistical methods, Doug emphasized that a statistician’s biggest impact was often in ensuring adherence to basic statistical good practice. For further topics and details, we refer the reader to textbooks written or edited by Doug (Altman, 1991a; Altman, Machin, Bryant, & Gardner, 2000; Gore & Altman, 1982; Moher, Altman, Schulz, Simera, & Wager, 2014; Riley, van der Windt, Croft, & Moons, 2019) and to references given in tributes mentioned above
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
