title: Etiologic research: needed revisions of concepts and principles.
abstract: Even though etiologic research has been the central concern in academic epidemiology, its concepts have remained confused or malformed, starting from that of etiology itself; and the same applies to its principles, starting from the notion that the principal variants of an etiologic study are the 'cohort' study and the 'case-control' study. This article suggests revisions of some central concepts pertaining to the object (and objective) of an etiologic study, and it posits an updated conception of the essence--singular--the study itself. This is supplemented by some novel, yet merely orientational, propositions in respect to quality-assurance in etiologic research.
authors.affiliation: Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and of Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. osm@epid.lan.mcgill.ca
authors.forename: O S
authors.initials: OS
authors.lastname: Miettinen
mesh_terms: D016022:Case-Control Studies; D015331:Cohort Studies; D004194:Disease / Q000209:etiology*; D004812:Epidemiologic Methods; D006801:Humans; D015203:Reproducibility of Results