Retired Guide - Systematic Review (SR) Service: Critical Appraisal

• AGREE (Appraisal of Guidelines, Research and Evaluation in Europe) - international collaboration of researchers and policy makers who seek to improve the quality and effectiveness of clinical practice guidelines.
• CASP - Critical Appraisal Skills Programme. This resource is produced by Solutions for Public Health (SPH), a not-for-profit NHS public health organisation in the UK.  Product strength is that it provides a different evaluation tool for different types of research studies, which is important since search results will usually have a variety of study types.
• CATmaker - A computer-assisted critical appraisal open source tool which helps you create critically appraised topics for key articles you encounter about Therapy, Diagnosis, Prognosis, Aetiology/Harm, and Systematic Reviews of Therapy.                                                         
• CEBM (Centre for Evidence-based Medicine) - Based in Oxford, UK, this centre aims to promote evidence-based health care. and resources to doctors, clinicians, teachers and others interested in learning more about EBM.
• Centre for Evidence Based Medicine: Critical Appraisal Sheets - Established in Oxford as the first of several UK centres with the aim of promoting evidence-based health care.
• CONSORT - The main product of this resource is the consort statement, which is an evidence-based, minimum set of recommendations for reporting randomized trials. It offers a standard way for authors to prepare reports of trial findings, facilitating their complete and transparent reporting, and aiding their critical appraisal and interpretation.
• Downs' and Black's Critical Appraisal Tool - Provides both an overall score for study quality and a numeric score out of a possible 30 points. Contains five sections. Administration of the tool can happen either within a systematic review process, or as a quality assessment tool for individual articles.
• The Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS) for assessing the quality of nonrandomized studies in meta-analyses - Ongoing collaboration between the Universities of Newcastle, Australia and Ottawa, Canada. This scale was developed to assess the quality of non-randomized studies with its design, content and ease of use directed to the task of incorporating the quality assessments in the interpretation of meta-analytic results.
• Pragmatic Explanatory Continuum Indicator Summary (PRECIS: a tool to help trial designers - Tool to help researchers/clinicians in making decisions that are consistent with their trial’s stated purpose (validated).

• Development of a critical appraisal tool to assess the quality of cross-sectional studies (AXIS) (2016)
• The reliability of a quality appraisal tool for studies of diagnostic reliability (QAREL) (2013)
• The experience of critiquing published research: learning from the student and researcher perspective (2011)
• QUADAS-2: a revised tool for the quality assessment of diagnostic accuracy studies (2011)
• A review of critical appraisal tools show they lack rigor: Alternative tool structure is proposed (2011)
• Teaching critical appraisal skills in healthcare settings (2011)
• A comparative analysis of three online appraisal instruments' ability to assess validity in qualitative research (2010)
• How to Critically Appraise an Article (2009)
• The development of QUADAS: a tool for the quality assessment of studies of diagnostic accuracy included in systematic reviews (2003)

Assessing case reports/case series:

• Do we CARE about the quality of case reports? A systematic assessment (Nov 2018)
• Methodological quality and synthesis of case series and case reports (April 2018)
• How to review a case report (April 2016)