Evidence-Based Practice: Appraising the Evidence

Worksheets to help you appraise the reliability, importance and applicability of clinical evidence.

PRISMA is an evidence-based minimum set of items for reporting in systematic reviews and meta-analyses. PRISMA focuses on the reporting of reviews evaluating randomized trials, but can also be used as a basis for reporting systematic reviews of other types of research, particularly evaluations of interventions.

Moher D, Liberati A, Tetzlaff J, Altman DG, The PRISMA Group (2009) Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses: The PRISMA Statement. PLoS Med 6(7): e1000097. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000097

The Appraisal of Guidelines for Research and Evaluation (AGREE) Instrument evaluates the process of practice guideline development and the quality of reporting.

The GRADE working group began in the year 2000 as an informal collaboration of people with an interest in addressing the shortcomings of present grading systems in health care. Our aim is to develop a common, sensible approach to grading quality of evidence and strength of recommendation.

Articles in the BMJ that explain how to read and interpret different kinds of research papers.

The Number Needed to Treat (NNT) is the number of patients you need to treat to prevent one additional bad outcome (death, stroke, etc.).

The Likelihood Ratio (LR) is the likelihood that a given test result would be expected in a patient with the target disorder compared to the likelihood that that same result would be expected in a patient without the target disorder.

To understand what is meant by the terms SpPin and SnNout, we need to understand the notions of sensitivity and specificity.

Version 2 of the Cochrane risk-of-bias tool for randomized trials (RoB 2) is the recommended tool to assess the risk of bias in randomized trials included in Cochrane Reviews

The ROBINS-I is a tool developed to assess risk of bias in the results of non-randomized studies that compare health effects of two or more interventions.

The ROB-ME tool is intended for authors of systematic reviews to assess risk of bias due to missing evidence in meta-analyses of the effects of interventions, in any other type of pairwise synthesis that yields a point estimate of an intervention effect (e.g. calculation of the median effect across studies when meta-analysis is not possible or appropriate), or in syntheses consisting of only one study with available results.

A collaborative project mapping all the biases that affect health evidence

The aim of this resource is to provide a series of useful tips on data extraction, to shed light on, and raise awareness of the different methods and equations that are available to convert data into what you need for meta-analysis. I’ll also try to demystify the maths by giving worked examples and only offering the derivation of the equations as an optional extra.