Jonas Ranstam's website
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Jonas Ranstam BSc PhD is a former professor of medical statistics at Lund University, Sweden, and an internationally active medical statistical consultant with extensive experience from collaboration in randomised trials and epidemiological studies. He is a member of the ISI 🔗 and ISCB 🔗 and is particularly interested in statistical reviewing. He has reviewed over 7000 manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals and was in 2016 the overall winner of Publons' Sentinels of Science Award.
Modern medical science was born late. Historically, medical research has been dogmatic. Published reports have been based on authoritative case reports and expert opinions. The importance of providing evidence hasn't been generally recognised and accepted until the 1940s and 1950s. Today, medical science is considered a process of systematically collecting and evaluating empirical evidence through observation and experimentation for developing and testing hypotheses and theories. Empirical evidence provides the foundation for scientific knowledge and understanding; unless scientific claims are supported by empirical evidence, they are not considered valid and reliable.
However, imprecise or biased research information can easily mislead and corrupt science. Therefore, many scientific journals, especially high-impact factor journals, engage professional statisticians as reviewers of manuscripts submitted for publication. The emphasis of the work focuses on the limitations and weaknesses imposed upon presented findings by the investigator's research question, study design, data collection, and statistical analysis. Completed reviews are usually presented in a brief report to the editorial office, describing both errors of commission and omission and suggesting corrections and reanalyses.