Steven N. Goodman

Steven N. Goodman (born 1954) is an American epidemiologist and Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health and of Medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine, where he serves as Associate Dean of Clinical and Translational Research. He is co-founder and co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), a center dedicated to studying and improving the reproducibility and efficiency of biomedical research, alongside John Ioannidis. He is also founder and director of the Stanford Program on Research Rigor and Reproducibility (SPORR). He is a sibling of journalist and Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and journalist David Goodman.

Education and career

Goodman received his AB in Biochemistry and Applied Mathematics from Harvard College in 1976, his MD from New York University School of Medicine, and his MHS and PhD in Biostatistics from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, completing his doctoral dissertation Evidence and Clinical Trials in 1989 under the supervision of Richard Royall.

In 1999, Goodman published his most cited work, a two-part series in the Annals of Internal Medicine titled "Toward Evidence-Based Medical Statistics," in which he identified what he called the "P value fallacy"—the widespread misinterpretation of p-values as direct measures of the probability that a hypothesis is true—and proposed the Bayes factor as a more interpretable alternative for quantifying statistical evidence. His 2008 paper "A Dirty Dozen: Twelve P-Value Misconceptions" catalogued twelve common misinterpretations of the p-value and has been widely cited across multiple disciplines.

Research reproducibility

Goodman has been a leading figure in efforts to define and improve research reproducibility. In 2016, he co-authored a widely cited Science Translational Medicine paper with Daniele Fanelli and John Ioannidis that proposed a standardized conceptual framework distinguishing among "methods reproducibility," "results reproducibility," and "inferential reproducibility." In 2007, he and Sander Greenland published a critique of Ioannidis's influential claim that most published research findings are false, arguing that the conclusion rested on circular reasoning within its Bayesian framework.

He has also contributed to work on reproducible research practices in medical publishing.

Clinical research methods

Goodman has made contributions to the methods of clinical trials, comparative effectiveness research, and meta-analysis. He co-authored work on methodological standards for comparative effectiveness research with the PCORI, and published on the need for transformational change in randomized clinical trial design for comparative effectiveness. He also contributed to the development of methods for comparative effectiveness research more broadly.

His work on meta-analysis includes early contributions on the role of evidence in meta-analytic synthesis and later work addressing the problem of inconsistent effects in random-effects meta-analysis. He has also written on the concept of "metabias" as a challenge for comparative effectiveness research.

Additional contributions include work on practical improvements to the continual reassessment method for phase I studies, the misuse of statistical power in interpreting clinical trial results, Bayesian approaches to pediatric clinical trials, and the quality of peer review.

Research ethics and causal inference

Goodman has contributed to the ethics of clinical research, particularly in the context of learning healthcare systems. He co-authored work with Ruth Faden and Nancy Kass proposing an ethics framework that departs from the traditional research-treatment distinction, and contributed to discussions of ethical considerations in drug safety research. He has also co-authored work on causal inference in public health.

Awards and honors

Myrto Lefkopoulou Distinguished Lecturer, Harvard Department of Biostatistics (2000) Spinoza Chair in Medicine, University of Amsterdam (2016) Abraham Lilienfeld Award, American College of Epidemiology (2019) Elected to the National Academy of Medicine (2020)

Selected publications