Appraising Appraising
AGREE
AGREE (Appraisal of Guidelines Research & Evaluation) is an international collaboration of researchers and policy makers who seek to improve the quality and effectiveness of clinical practice guidelines by establishing a shared framework for their development, reporting and assessment.
BET Database Search Engine
"From this page you can search the entire BestBETs database for BETs [Best Evidence Topics] or critical appraisals." BETs were developed at the Emergency Department, Manchester Royal Infirmary, UK, to provide rapid evidence-based answers to real-life clinical questions, using a systematic approach to reviewing the literature.
Canadian Family Physician Critical Appraisal
Critical Appraisal reviews important articles in the literature relevant to family physicians. Reviews are by family physicians, not experts on the topics. They assess not only the strength of the studies but the bottom line clinical importance for family practice. Also described as "Family Medicine research reviews with a 'bottom line'".
CASP Appraisal Checklists
Questionnaires used in critical appraisal of evidence. The Critical Appraisal Skills programme uses these questionnaires to appraise different types of research. Developed by the Learning and Development section of the NHS Public Health Resource Unit, questionnaires are available on the following subjects:
CAT Crawler
An online resource for Critically Appraised Topics provided by the Bioinformatics Institute in Singapore.
CATmaker
"CATmaker is a software tool which helps you create Critically Appraised Topics, or CATs, for the key articles you encounter about Therapy, Diagnosis, Prognosis, Aetiology/Harm and Systematic Reviews of Therapy."
Clinical Evidence
Clinical Evidence is a compendium of the best available research findings on common and important clinical questions, updated and expanded every six months. Sample pages are available as Acrobat files.
Cochrane Collaboration Handbook
The Cochrane Collaboration's handbook is its main working document. It provides practical guidance for developing and Cochrane Systematic Reviews.
Critical Appraisal Worksheets
A number of sites make available printable or form-fill worksheets for critically appraising articles. The best of these are based on the JAMA User Guides series (see Library). Links to worksheets by study type are as follows:
Therapy - CASP Version
Overview
Overview - CASP Version
Qualitative research - CASP Version
Clinical Practice Guideline II
Economic Evaluation (CASP Version)
Variations in Outcomes
Development and Evaluation Committee Reports
These reports have been prepared as part of the Development and Evaluation Service funded by the Research and Development Directorate South and West. They are intended to provide rapid, accurate and usable information on health technology effectiveness to purchasers, clinicians, managers and researchers in the South and West. An archive of the DEC Reports is also available at the Bristol site.
EBM Toolbox
Not to be confused with the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine's resource of the same name, this is a Canadian based collection of resources to support EBM. It includes appraisal checklists, methodological filters and other User Guide-associated resources.
Evidence-Based Practice Checklists
Developed at the General Practice & Primary Care department of the University of Glasgow, these checklists are "designed to help you ask the appropriate questions of different types of research designs". Checklists are available for articles on the following subjects:
Evidence-Based Practice for Public Health Project
Based at the Lamar Soutter Library at the University of Massachusets Medical School, this project aims to examine clinical models of evidence-based medicine and "assess their effectiveness to the public health literature." The project will also identify any existing evidence-based projects in public health and assess their effectiveness. The outcomes of the project will be: an Evidence-based Public Health website; an electronic publication or database based on the preferred models(s); and a training program for public health practitioners introducing them to evidence-based public health practice and literature retrieval methods.
Health Evidence Bulletins, Wales
The Health Evidence Bulletins - Wales act as signposts to the best current evidence across a broad range of evidence types and subject areas. Where information from randomised controlled trials is available it is included. However, many health issues do not lend themselves easily to investigation, or have not yet been studied, by this method. In these cases, high quality evidence has been sought from observational and other studies.
Health Technology Assessment Reports
This resource at the Wessex Institute for Research and Development contains abstracts for the completed reviews from the National Health Service Health Technology Assessment Programme.
Méta-analyses des essais thérapeutiques (French)
Ce site propose une série de ressources relatives aux méta-analyses des essais thérapeutiques. [A valuable bibliographic site with many English Language references].
Numbers Needed to Treat
This is a ScHARR Compilation page containing links to NNT sites, tools and a Medline Bibliography.
Users' Guides to the Health Care Literature
The Evidence Based Medicine Working Group, a group of clinicians at McMaster and colleagues across North America, have created a set of guides, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The Users' Guide series aim to assist clinicians to keep up to date in their clinical discipline and to find the best way to manage a particular clinical problem. The User's Guides put much emphasis on integrative studies, including systematic overviews, practice guidelines, decision analysis, and economic analysis. They introduce strategies for efficiently searching the medical literature. Full-text of some of the Guides is available. (A complete list of the published guides, together with their full bibliographic references is available.)
Workshop on How to Teach Evidence Based Clinical Practice
McMaster University Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics have assembled sets of readings dealing with evidence-based medicine and critical appraisal issues in therapy, diagnosis, prognosis, harm, overviews and economic analysis. Some materials, complete with checklists and cribsheets is available on the Internet, and may be downloaded to support Critical Appraisal skills programmes locally.