Critical Appraisal

The majority of content indexed in healthcare databases has not undergone additional critical appraisal. The papers indexed on these databases are not appraised by the indexers, and consequently their quality is variable. This chapter contains some resources for appraising documents. The critical appraisal process should entail a fair assessment of the research, weighing up the strengths and weaknesses, benefits and limitations. The purpose of critical appraisal is to find out the answers to the following three questions: (i) what are the results (ii) are the results valid, and (iii) how will these results help? The chapter provides a list of checklists and tools available to help support critical appraisal such as Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine – checklists and tools, and Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) – tools.