Historical Articles and Video Interviews in Celebration of the American Journal of Epidemiology’s 100th Anniversary
In celebration of the Journal’s centennial, we hosted a symposium at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Epidemiologic Research at which we discussed 4 highly cited AJE articles. Subsequently, Dr. Lorraine Dean, AJE Editor in Residency, conducted interviews with the authors of those articles to gain further insight into the thinking behind and impact of these works.
4:30: “When I see people misinterpreting things that are published in the literature or that are statistical, I like to try to get to the bottom of it… Is it because it wasn’t well-written? Is it because it’s not accessible? Is it because there was something wrong with the original research? I always find that I have the most fun when things I dive into have already come to me a couple of times and therefore I feel pretty confident are going to have an impact on the use of statistics in public health research.”
5:02: “As a biostatistician, I’m often one step behind the scenes. I really enjoy the fact that I get to collaborate with all these researchers, but the people who get the headlines are always the primary researchers, the epidemiologists, the public health researchers, so I feel really honored that as biostatisticians, Eric and I are both biostatisticians, we get a little piece of recognition for our contributions.”
2:45: “My favorite part, was probably thinking deeply about this topic and discussing it with my co-authors Enrique and Miguel. I think epidemiologists enjoy this 'brain workout'. You see that all the time at SER, at socials, at dinners with other peers.”
4:05: “The paper would be influential for the very first step in research, so ‘what is your question?’…Clarifying ‘what is your question?’ before deciding to adjust for a variable is really important because just because you can adjust for something… you may not need or you may not want to adjust for it.”
3:50: “When writing this paper, we were standing on the shoulders of giants, in a way, we were at the right place at the right time, because we had been given all the tools needed to explain the implications of this formal causal inference theory using simple graphs in such a way that anyone with sufficient interest, even those with little mathematical background, could understand what all the fuss was about”
4:17: “To me, causal inference is not a separate set of tools for epidemiologists, because most of what epidemiologists do is causal inference anyway. If we conduct a case-control study, we are doing causal inference. If we adjust for confounders in a Cox model, that’s causal inference too.”
4:30: “It’s really important to think deeply about the question we’re asking, about the biology that’s related to that question, and then we find a statistical model that fits our question and will provide an informative answer.”
4:53: “If I were submitting this today, I would still submit it to AJE… I think it is the best place to put papers that are more methodological... These are in some ways the most important articles that we publish because they do influence how we do our analyses and how other people do their analyses and advance the field.”
