GRBIO researchers publish an open access book so that medicine and statistics speak the same language

A physician and a statistician can read the same study and see two different things. They share words such as bias, confidence or significance, but the meanings do not always travel. That quiet misunderstanding has a cost: studies that leave out what matters, results that are misread, and evidence that never quite reaches the patient.

A new book published by Iniciativa Digital Politècnica sets out to close that gap. Statistics and Health: Methodological Principles in Reporting Guidelines is the work of Jordi Cortés, Núria Pérez, Marta Vilaró, Erik Cobo and José Antonio González, researchers of the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics group (GRBIO) at IRIS UPC, together with Michael J. Campbell of the University of Sheffield.

Rather than offering one more manual of techniques, the authors return to the reporting guidelines of the EQUATOR Network, the checklists that leading medical journals ask researchers to follow, and explain the reasoning behind them. Only ideas that have earned scientific consensus make it onto the page. The result is a common ground where clinicians, nurses and pharmacists can meet statisticians, mathematicians and engineers on equal terms.

At IRIS UPC we are proud to share a publication that distils more than a decade of GRBIO research on making science more transparent and more useful. It is a reminder of something simple and increasingly urgent: good research is not only research done well, but research told well.

The book is published in open access and can be downloaded free of charge from UPCommons.

REFERENCE

Cortés, J., Campbell, M. J., Pérez, N., Vilaró, M., Cobo, E., & González, J. A. (2026). Statistics and health: methodological principles in reporting guidelines. Iniciativa Digital Politècnica, UPC. doi.org/10.5821/ebook-9791388098161