Step 3: Appraise
Now that you have the evidence, you need to assess its quality.
This page will provide a general outline of this step, including helpful tools; however, for more in-depth help, refer to your coursework and readings.
Critical Appraisal of Evidence
This video will give you an introduction to critical appraisal and explain why it is an important step.
Critical Appraisal Tools
There are several critical appraisal tools out there, but the most commonly used ones are appraisal checklists.
They help you make a judgement about the quality of a study by prompting you to consider a number of areas.
- Joanna Briggs Institute: Critical Appraisal Checklists Checklists for different publication types including systematic reviews, randomised controlled trials and more. Prompts users to make an overall judgement on whether to include, exclude or seek more information.
- Critical Appraisal Skills Programme Checklists CASP offers 8 different checklists for different publication types including systematic reviews, qualitative studies and randomised controlled trials. Each checklist contains questions to help you appraise the trustworthiness, relevance and results of articles.
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