Library Guides: Meta-analyses: Appraise

Appraise critically

The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine offers some simple advice for starting the process of critical appraisal:

"Critical appraisal is the systematic evaluation of clinical research papers in order to establish:

Does this study address a clearly focused question?
Did the study use valid methods to address this question?
Are the valid results of this study important?
Are these valid, important results applicable to my patient or population?

If the answer to any of these questions is “no”, you can save yourself the trouble of reading the rest of it."

There are more tools for critical appraisal on the Centre for Evidence-Based Practice website.

Critical appraisal resources

Appraising the evidence
The Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) offers a three-step approach to the critical appraisal of research evidence. There is also a link on this page to a set of eight critical appraisal tools and checklists designed to be used when reading research.
Critical appraisal tools
The Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) provides a number of checklists as critical appraisal tools for different types of studies, including one for systematic reviews.
Critical Appraisal Tools
This list from the International Centre for Allied Health Evidence at the University of South Australia contains many different appraisal tools for lots of study types.
McMaster Critical Review Forms and Guidelines
Produced by the Occupational Therapy Evidence-Based Practice Research Group, McMaster University, Canada. Available from the CanChild website. CanChild is recognized as a research centre of McMaster University.
PRISMA
PRISMA is an evidence-based minimum set of items for reporting in systematic reviews and meta-analyses. PRISMA focuses on the reporting of reviews evaluating randomized trials, but can also be used as a basis for reporting systematic reviews of other types of research, particularly evaluations of interventions.
STROBE
STROBE provides a checklist of items that should be included in articles reporting observational study types.
CEECAT: Collaboration for Environmental Evidence Critical Appraisal Tool Version 0.2 (Prototype)
a critical appraisal tool for evaluating ‘risk of bias’ (or internal validity) of primary studies assessing effectiveness of interventions or impacts of exposures in environmental management.

Critical appraisal tools

RobotReviewer
Robot reviewer is a tool designed to automatically extract information about bias (using the Cochrane Risk of Bias tool), and additionally, can extract information about the participants, interventions, and outcomes studied in a trial.
Systematic Review Toolbox
Use the Quality Assessment checkbox to find more tools for appraising studies.