Here are some of the things I have found helpful; for myself and for others when working in epidemiology. I do my best to keep it updated!
I am definitely not the most experienced epidemiologist around, but something really interesting about the field is that one person really cannot know it all. That leads to a situation where everybody has something of value to contribute, so here are some interesting reads and resources that I love and wish others in epidemiology and public health knew more about, that have helped me in applied ways.
Bayes’ Rules! An Introduction to Applied Bayesian Modeling - a book on Bayesian statistical application; it does a great job of teaching you everything you need to know without making everything a silly story or so obtuse you feel insulted. Plus, it’s free! check it out here.
Cody’s Collection of Popular SAS Programming Tasks - Yes, I use R (this blog is made using R in fact) but most state and local health departments use SAS and Excel. This is essentially a list of really common things that you can just copy and paste code to accomplish, and presto! You’re finding rolling averages and cleaning data as fast as you can say “Ctrl +v.”
Carpenter’s Complete Guide to the SAS Macro Language - once you realize you need a bit more from your SAS programs to make things really flow, especially when working collaboratively or seeking to further automate some tasks, this is what you need. From setting up basic macros to creating a full autocall library full of powerful tools that do your work for you, Carpenter’s has you covered.
Principles & Practice of Public HealthSurveillance- Depending on where you got your degree, actual classes on how to ‘do surveillance’ may not exist. This is the closest thing I’ve seen to an actual manual on what surveillance is (compared to the CDC’s manual, which just shows you how to report a specific disease; the CDC’s manual basically assumes you’ve already read this book).
Handbook of Infectious Disease Analysis - In courses, I’ve found that students are usually taught the introductory versions of infectious disease models, and maybe a few other things. If you really want to crank up your ability to provide “current industry standard” analyses, this book can help you.
Writing Instructional Objectives for Teaching and Assessment - Are you giving a training or a teaching a class? This book is a standard read for keeping your instruction focused on specific objectives, and how that can allow you to ensure you reach those objectives with your audience or students.
Applying Quantitative Bias Analysis to Epidemiologic Data - a great book on bias analysis and how to do it – it even provides some handy Excel sheets that can handle the analysis for you. Accounting for bias is a part of establishing cause and evaluating inference - we should all be doing more of this as researchers and this book makes it straightforward.
DAGitty - It’s a free DAG creator that works well, it’s online and in R, and if you aren’t putting a causal diagram in your research… what are you doing? You may already be familiar with DAGitty, but I think it’s still worth mentioning since, really any assessment of cause (i.e. hypothesis testing) should present a DAG. It can be found here.
Task Scheduler - this is not a book or website; it is a function that is a part of Microsoft Windows that is sadly under-utilized. Do you want to set your computer to run some code at 05:00 every day? This will set that up for you, and if you have SAS Enterprise Guide, it is a point-and-click process. Here is a SAS blog for more information on how to do this in SAS, but I’ve used Task Scheduler with R and Python as well. We’re never going to be given more and asked to do less… we’re always going to be given less and asked to do more, so work smarter where you can!
ProMed - The International Society of Infectious Disease’s global surveillance system. It provides line lists of almost every known outbreak. It used to be an email service only (and boy, did you get emails if you signed up), but they have updated to provide an intuitive webpage and map that is a great interface for their surveillance system; find it here.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but are a few highlights from my PhD and from working in the field that are some of my favorites, beyond Modern Epidemiology of course. If you have questions, or think I’m missing something, let me know!
I also believe that sometimes it just isn’t helpful to throw textbooks at people (I know I haven’t always been in the mood when a professor has done that to me), so I’ll probably go through why I like some of these, pick out some examples of how they are helpful, and go through some application in later posts.