It’s hard to keep up with the latest evidence. Not only is the sheer volume of newly published papers overwhelming and the variety of topics broad and wide, but then after finding a paper that piques your interest you are still faced with the tricky task of critically assessing the paper's quality and relevance. Metajournal aims to solve many of these problems, but sometimes you need to just sit down and drag that paper over the keel yourself.
One of the most useful tools I have found are checklists provided by the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme, a UK non-profit based in Oxford. CASP runs workshops that educate healthcare workers and others on how to appraised medical evidence — and they share online the great checklists they use during the workshop under a Creative Commons license.
Find → Appraise → Act
They provide a set of eight critical appraisal tools designed to be used when reading research, covering:
- Systematic Reviews
- Randomised Controlled Trials
- Cohort Studies
- Case Control Studies
- Economic Evaluations
- Diagnostic Studies
- Qualitative studies
- Clinical Prediction Rule
