Evidence-Based Medicine: Review and Practice: Appraise: Evaluating article content
Created by Health Science Librarians
How to appraise an article
Once you have gathered the evidence, you will need to appraise the evidence for its relevance, reliability, validity, and applicability
Ask questions like:
Relevance:
- Is the research method/study design appropriate for answering the research question?
- Are specific inclusion / exclusion criteria used?
Reliability:
- Is the effect size practically relevant? How precise is the estimate of the effect? Were confidence intervals given?
Validity:
- Were there enough subjects in the study to establish that the findings did not occur by chance?
- Were subjects randomly allocated? Were the groups comparable? If not, could this have introduced bias?
- Are the measurements/ tools validated by other studies?
- Could there be confounding factors?
Applicability:
- Can the results be applied to my organization and my patient?