Many individuals have contributed to the fruition of this book. The concepts and vision for this book have evolved over 20 years of teaching professional courses in research design, biostatistics, and drug literature evaluation. Feedback from pharmacy students and regular discussions with colleagues, especially Dr. Rebecca Baer at South Dakota State University (Aparasu) and Dr. Kim Adcock at the University of Mississippi (Bentley), were instrumental in developing the master plan for this book. Sincere thanks to all of the authors for patiently working with us in developing the chapter content and updating the chapters, and most importantly for contributing their expertise to this book. The feedback from the reviewers was also very helpful in improving the content and formatting of the book. The insight and support of Drs. Albert Wertheimer and Shane Desselle was instrumental in undertaking this book.
We greatly appreciate Dr. Jeffrey Sherer for helping us to recruit the authors for the third section of the book and overseeing the development of initial chapter outlines. Our gratitude also goes to several of our graduate students, who offered input from a student's perspective on several chapters. Several individuals provided valuable feedback to us following the publication of the first edition of the book; we would like to especially acknowledge Dr. Lourdes Planas, a faculty member at the College of Pharmacy at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, for her kind words, encouragement, and suggestions for improvement. We appreciate the editorial assistance of Dr. Satabdi Chatterjee for the second edition. We also would like to thank our respective university and college/school faculty colleagues and administration teams for providing us the time and encouragement to complete this project. Finally, we are grateful to the publishing team at McGraw-Hill Education, especially Michael Weitz and Peter Boyle their help and support. The editorial assistance of the production staff of McGraw-Hill Education is also very much appreciated and we would like to specifically acknowledge the efforts and support of Apoorva Mathur with Cenveo Publisher Services.