Introduction Final Project

Biostatistics 212
Due 9/20/11

Final Project

This is the most important assignment for Biostat 212.  We want you to be able to take data that you or a colleague generate and turn it into a publishable product.  As we will teach you in this course, this is not simply a matter of knowing the right Stata commands to produce statistics and p-values.  This will require actual data, an understanding of the data, importing the data into STATA, generating derived variables that you will use for your analysis, labeling your variables, doing the analysis, saving and documenting your analysis, and producing Tables and Figures that other people can understand.  The purpose of the Final Project is to have you practice these tasks on your own data.  In keeping with the spirit of Designing Clinical Research and our clinical research curriculum, we hope you will take advantage of this opportunity to analyze your own data, and produce Tables and Figures that you can actually use in a manuscript*.

With these goals in mind, please do the following:

1)    Create a Table, formatted as required for submission to an appropriate journal, complete with title, headings, data, and footnotes (including spelled-out versions of all abbreviations and other notes as needed to clarify meaning or methodology).  This should be produced with Microsoft Word or a similar word processing program using data analyzed using Stata.

2)    Create a Figure of quality suitable for submission to a journal.  This can be produced completely within STATA using a Stata graphics command, or it can be produced using Excel.  If the figure is produced using Excel, you will need to generate the numbers for the figure using Stata.  The figure should be pasted into a separate page in the Word document above.

3)    Create a Figure Legend on a separate page, as you would when submitting to a journal.  The figure legend should include the Title of the figure, clarifications, p-values and extra analysis results if appropriate, and spelled-out versions of all abbreviations used in the Figure.

4)    Print the Log Files for the table and for the figure.  This is how we check your work, and will be graded separately.  The log files (created by a do file, as we have been doing all Summer) should document how your do file loads a Stata dataset and analyzes it, and should include the standard housekeeping commands taught in Lab 2.  The analyses generating every data point you use for your Table need to be documented here, as well as the Stata command used to generate the Figure (if you use a Stata graphics command) or the numbers for the figure (if you use Excel to produce the figure).  You will be graded on these as well as the actual Tables and Figures. 

5)    Print in this order: Table, Table log, Figure, Figure Legend, Figure log.  Put your name on the packet and hand it in to Olivia by the end of the day on 9/20/11.

In order to receive a “Satisfactory” grade in this class, your work on this project must be satisfactory (approximately equivalent to a “B”) along with completing the other course requirements.

Have fun!  We will award bragging rights and extra credit for the most artistic/creative/informative table and figure produced.

* Note – If you do not have access to your own data, please ask for some from your mentor.  If your mentor does not have any data, come talk to me.