The appraisal stage for rapid reviews is often amended to save time.
Different methods used for appraisal include having:
Some papers also report on completing appraisal but not identifying the number of appraisers and others do not conduct an appraisal or do not report on whether an appraisal was completed.
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:
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.
Prof Adrian Esterman, How to appraise the studies: an introduction to assessing study quality, JCU Systematic Review Masterclass 2017
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