Preface

Abstract

The 29th Annual Conference of the International Society for Clinical Biostatistics took place in Copenhagen, August 17–21, 2008. It was the second time ISCB visited Denmark, the first was in 1992. The venue was the School of Architecture, across the water from Downtown Copenhagen, so the potential means of transportation included not only the ordinary bus, but also the waterbus. The social program included a reception at the town hall and a conference dinner in the famous Tivoli gardens, where the dinner was accompanied by entertainment with fighting Vikings. The number of participants was 570, which was record high. The local organizing committee, headed by Bjarne Bodin, must be congratulated for this great success. Scientifically, the meeting started with four courses on, respectively, adaptive designs, models for discrete longitudinal data, Bayesian methods for biostatistical applications and non-inferiority trials. There were six invited sessions, on, respectively, plenary state-of-the-art lectures, causal models and evidence from non-randomized studies, recent developments in genetics, biomarkers—qualification and application, analysis of adaptive trials: tests, estimates and confidence intervals, as well as a non-scientific session on working places in biostatistics. A highlight of the conference was the key note lecture by Niels Keiding on sampling patterns in event history analysis, with applications to epidemiology, a talk, which was by special invitation of the ISCB president, Emmanuel Lesaffre. Furthermore, there were 27 contributed paper sessions and 2 poster sessions. This brings the total number of presentations up to around 300. The conference logo was a bridge, referring not only to the nearby physical bridge to Sweden (the conference was jointly organized by Denmark and Sweden), but also to symbolize that a scientific conference acts like a communication bridge, connecting biostatisticians from around the world. I also think the conference was highly successful in this regard. For this special issue, there were 47 submissions, of which 23 are accepted and published here. Two more papers have not yet completed the evaluation process and may appear in a later issue. The amount of work involved in writing and publishing these papers can be illustrated by the following numbers. There were 145 author entries (this number is not corrected for multiple entries) who have submitted 97 different versions of their papers, and they have been evaluated by 86 reviewers (in this case, there are no multiple entries) and myself. The reviewers made a total of 114 review reports. In this issue, the papers are presented according to topic. There are four papers on design of studies. There are 3 papers on the analysis of logistic models, 3 on continuous variables and 11 on survival data. Finally, there are two papers on meta-analysis. I am very satisfied with the quality of these papers, so please read and enjoy them. I would like to thank the authors for their contributions, the referees for their help in assessing the papers, the journal editors for giving us space in this journal, the editorial staff for assistance, and the scientific program committee members for their help in creating a stimulating program.