International Links - Appraising

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Appraising

AGREE

AGREE (Appraisal of Guidelines Research & Evaluation) is an international collaboration of researchers and policy makers who seek to improve the quality and effectiveness of clinical practice guidelines by establishing a shared framework for their development, reporting and assessment.
http://www.agreecollaboration.org/

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Canadian Family Physician Critical Appraisal

Critical Appraisal reviews important articles in the literature relevant to family physicians. Reviews are by family physicians, not experts on the topics. They assess not only the strength of the studies but the bottom line clinical importance for family practice. Also described as "Family Medicine research reviews with a 'bottom line'".
http://dfcm19.med.utoronto.ca/twhdfcm/evans.htm

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CASP Appraisal Checklists

Questionnaires used in critical appraisal of evidence. The critical appraisal skills programme uses these questionnaires to appraise different types of research.
http://www.phru.org.uk/~casp/appraisa.htm

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CASP Guide to Statistical Terms

This brief "statistics for the uninitiated" guide explains and illustrates the use of measures of clinical effectiveness such as: Relative Risk (RR) and Number Needed to Treat (NNT) and also discusses Confidence Intervals (CI).
http://www.public-health.org.uk/casp/statistics.html

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Clinical Evidence

Clinical Evidence is a compendium of the best available research findings on common and important clinical questions, updated and expanded every six months. Sample pages are available as Acrobat files.
http://www.clinicalevidence.org/

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Cochrane Collaboration Handbook

The Cochrane Collaboration's handbook is its main working document. It provides practical guidance for developing and Cochrane Systematic Reviews.
http://www.cochrane.org/cochrane/hbook.htm

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Critical Appraisal Resource Guide

This resource guide compiled by Andrew Booth at ScHARR provides a brief introduction to sources that can be used in teaching critical appraisal. It can also be downloaded as an MSWORD6 file.
http://www.nzgg.org.nz/tools/resource_critical_appraisal.cfm

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Critical Appraisal Worksheets

A number of sites make available printable or form-fill worksheets for critically appraising articles. The best of these are based on the JAMA User Guides series (see Core Virtual Library). Links to worksheets by study type are as follows:

• Causation and Harm
• Diagnostic Tests
• Prognosis
• Therapy - CASP Version
• Therapy and Prevention
• Overview
• Overview - CASP Version
• Qualitative research - CASP Version
• Clinical Practice Guideline II
• Economic Analysis
• Economic Evaluation (CASP Version)
• Variations in Outcomes
• Critically Appraised Topics (CATs)
• Critically appraised topics (CATs) are short, typically one page, digests that summarise the evidence for clinicians. There are a number of sites experimenting with the CAT format including:
• Centre for Evidence Based Medicine: http://cebm.jr2.ox.ac.uk/docs/catbank.html
• South Western Ontario Regional Academic Health Science Network: http://ahsn2.largnet.on.ca/cat/
• University of Michigan Pediatrics: http://www.ped.med.umich.edu/ebm/cat.htm
• University of North Carolina: http://www.med.unc.edu/medicine/edursrc/!catlist.htm
• University of Rochester Medical Center: http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/medicine/res/CATS/index.html
• University of Washington: http://depts.washington.edu/pedebm/topic/index.html

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Critique et Pratique (French)

Each week, members of the Laval University Family Medicine Department (Québec, Canada) summarize and comment on two articles from recent issues of medical journals. The commentary is based on evidence-based medicine principles and on the evaluation of the impact of research on medical practice.
http://www.crsfa.ulaval.ca/umf/

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Development and Evaluation Committee Reports

These reports have been prepared as part of the Development and Evaluation Service funded by the Research and Development Directorate South and West. They are intended to provide rapid, accurate and usable information on health technology effectiveness to purchasers, clinicians, managers and researchers in the South and West. An archive of the DEC Reports is also available at the Bristol site.
http://www.hta.nhsweb.nhs.uk/rapidhta/

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EBM Toolbox

Not to be confused with the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine's resource of the same name, this is a Canadian based collection of resources to support EBM. It includes appraisal checklists, methodological filters and other User Guide-associated resources.
http://www.med.ualberta.ca/ebm/ebm.htm

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Guideline Appraisal Project (GAP)

The Guidelines Appraisal Project (GAP) brings health services researchers, policy makers, and practitioners together in appraising, summarizing and disseminating information about clinical practice guidelines.
http://www.infoward.ualberta.ca/cpg/

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Guide to Clinical Preventive Services (2nd edition)

This full text resource is the 1996 edition which carefully reviews the evidence for and against hundreds of preventive services, recommending a test, immunization, or counseling intervention only when there is evidence that it is effective. Although the main audience for the Guide to Clinical Preventive Services is primary care physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants, it is intended to be of value also to policymakers, researchers, employers, and those in the health care financing community. I commend this report and its important message to all of them.
http://text.nlm.nih.gov/

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Health Evidence Bulletins, Wales

The Health Evidence Bulletins - Wales act as signposts to the best current evidence across a broad range of evidence types and subject areas. Where information from randomised controlled trials is available it is included. However, many health issues do not lend themselves easily to investigation, or have not yet been studied, by this method. In these cases, high quality evidence has been sought from observational and other studies.
http://hebw.uwcm.ac.uk/

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Health Reviews for Primary Care Providers

A listing of documents about primary care medicine and medical practice, available through the World Wide Web. Some links are to the documents themselves. Others are to article reviews, plus links to the articles' abstracts, when available. The documents were selected to serve the information needs of primary care practitioners.
http://library.mcphu.edu/resources/reviews/revw_ind.htm

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Health Technology Assessment Reports

This resource at the Wessex Institute for Research and Development contains abstracts for the completed reviews from the National Health Service Health Technology Assessment Programme.
http://www.hta.nhsweb.nhs.uk/main.htm

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Méta-analyses des essais thérapeutiques (French)

Ce site propose une série de ressources relatives aux méta-analyses des essays thérapeutiques. [A valuable bibliographic site with many English Language references].
http://www.spc.univ-lyon1.fr/~mcu/ma/

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Numbers Needed to Treat

This is a ScHARR Compilation page containing links to NNT sites, tools and a Medline Bibliography.
http://www.shef.ac.uk/~scharr/ir/nnt.html

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Screening and Diagnostic Tests (Cochrane Collaboration)

The Cochrane Collaboration Methods Working Group on Screening and Diagnostic Tests has placed its recommendations on how to search for, appraise and pool results of studies of diagnostic accuracy on the Web. The document includes a methodological bibliography.
http://www.cochrane.org/cochrane/sadtdoc1.htm

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Users' Guides to the Health Care Literature

The Evidence Based Medicine Working Group, a group of clinicians at McMaster and colleagues across North America, have created a set of guides, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The Users' Guide series aim to assist clinicians to keep up to date in their clinical discipline and to find the best way to manage a particular clinical problem. The User's Guides put much emphasis on integrative studies, including systematic overviews, practice guidelines, decision analysis, and economic analysis. They introduce strategies for efficiently searching the medicalliterature. Full-text of some of the Guides is available.
http://www.cche.net/principles/content_all.asp

(A complete list of the published guides, together with their full bibliographic references is available at: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~scharr/ir/userg.html)

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Workshop on How to Teach Evidence Based Clinical Practice

McMaster University Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics have assembled sets of readings dealing with evidence-based medicine and critical appraisal issues in therapy, diagnosis, prognosis, harm, overviews and economic analysis. Some materials, complete with checklists and crib sheets is available on the Internet, and may be downloaded to support Critical Appraisal skills programmes locally.
http://www.cche.net/ebcp/

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