Doug Altman's legacy to Cochrane and evidence synthesis

It is hard to find an area of medicine or health research where the initiatives Doug Altman instigated and championed have not had an influence. Doug was a man on several missions: advocating statistical peer review to reduce statistical errors in medical journals; improving doctors' and health researchers' understanding of statistics and research design through thoughtful teaching; writing accessible and well-used statistical notes; producing a major medical statistics textbook; advocating a focus on estimating e ects and confidence intervals rather than hypothesis testing; and providing numerous templates and guidelines to educate journals and researchers as to how they should report their studies.