Section outline

  • This section introduce critical appraisal and some tools to help do it - in particular the CASP tool.
    • What is critical appraisal? File

      This article by Amanda Burls from the U. Oxford is a helpful introduction to the topic of critical appraisal.

    • Rating quality of evidence and strength of recommendations: What is "quality of evidence" and why is it important to clinicians? File
    • Critically appraising RCTs File

      An EBD Journal Toolbox article by Derek Richards on appraisal of RCTs

    • This presentation allows you to move at your own pace through a critical appraisal. The paper I critically appraise is below, should you wish to follow it as is the CASP checklist I use.

    • Study used in Prezi File
    • CASP RCT checklist File
    • Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) URL

      The Critical Appraisal Skills Programme has been running for a number of years and the organisation has produced a series of critical appraisal tools to help to rapidly assess the validity of various study types. 

      We use their appraisal sheets with the students.

    • Critically appraising systematic reviews File

      A similar article for systematic reviews.

    • Assessing the methodological quality of published papers File

    • The AGREE tool can help to evaluate the quality of guidelines. 

    • If, like me, statistics seems like a big black hole of numbers and incomprehensible voodoo, you might find Harris and Taylor's Medical Statistics Made Easy helpful as it is directed at those of us who are using evidence rather than generating it. Thus it aims to help when critically-appraising papers to understand the terminology used but not to tell you how to calculate the figures. 

      Helpfully, the library have the second edition in the paper copy and the first edition as an e-book.