The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 270 No 7252 p799
7 June 2003

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A useful addition, but do students prefer to learn an easier way?

'Pharmaceutical statistics', by David Jones. Pp xvi+586. Price £29.95. London: Pharmaceutical Press; 2002. ISBN 0 85369 425 7

Proper statistical methodology and analysis are essential for generating robust inferences from pharmaceutical experiments. Yet in most science subjects, including pharmacy, the teaching of statistics is inadequate in the sense that graduates often emerge with little confidence in the use of statistical methods. Therefore any new book that attempts to help to familiarise the initiated with those methods is to be welcomed.

David Jones's book is aimed at pharmacy students, with the emphasis on the more basic methods, and tests such as analysis of variance and the chi-squared test are regarded as more advanced techniques by the author and publisher in the description of the book. A step by step approach is adopted in explaining tests and concepts such as the t-test, the Mann-Whitney test and linear regression. This should help the student gain more insight into the bases of the various tests. However, in my experience, few students have the necessary patience to learn this hard way and usually prefer the more superficial and quicker click and print approach to learning (or not) statistics on the computer. A strength of the book is the use of pharmaceutically relevant examples throughout the text, particularly in relation to pharmaceutics.

Overall, the book is a useful addition to the range of books available on pharmaceutical statistics.

Alain Li Wan Po

Professor Li Wan Po is professor of clinical pharmaceutics and director of the centre for evidence-based pharmacology at Aston University