CRITICAL APPRAISAL

Vivi Meidianawaty Medical Education Unit Faculty of Medicine Unswagati

Extrinsic Factors
External factor which are assumed (but not necessarily) to be associated with the quality of the article: Who wrote it Where they work What their job or qualification are Whether you have heard of them Who paid for the study Wich journal it is written in Whether they have written on the subject before etc

Intrinsic Factor
Those factors that relate to the study it self The appropriateness of the study design to the question being asked The suitability of the sample The methods used to recruite the sample Methods used to obtain the result etc

Appraisal
Critical appraisal is the process of carefully and systematically examining research to judge its trustworthiness, and its value and relevance in a particular context. It is an essential skill for evidence-based medicine because it allows clinicians to find and use research evidence reliably and efficiently.

Appraisal
Is a technique which increase the effectiveness of your reading by enabling you to exclude research studies that are too poorly designed to inform practice This frees your time to concentrate on a more systematic of those studies that cross the quality threshold and then to extract their salient point

Advantages
Systematically evaluating scientific literature Shifting the wheat from the chaff when your literature search harvest conflicting studies Filtering out original research or meta-analysis which are methodologically sound

Advantages
Deciding which papers are going to influence what you do in your daily work Breaking down barriers between research (pure science) and practice (applied science)

Supporting the development of Evidence Based Practice (EBP)

Basic Aspect to be appraised

Are the result of the study valid?(Validity) Are conclusion justified by the description of the methodology and the findings? Is the methodology sound, have the authors made the reasonable assumptions, are the confounding factors they have failed to consider? If they are using a sample, have they selected this to avoid bias?

Basic Aspect to be appraised

What are the result? (Reliability) What are the findings of this article? Is the effect large enough to be significance? How confident are we that the results fall within the bounds of reasonable expectation and are not mere fluke?

Basic Aspect to be appraised

Will the result help locally? (Applicability) Are the problems i deal with sufficiently like those in the study to extrapolate the findings? Can i generalise from this study tomy work place? Applicability (sometimes called utility) is, in someways,the hardest to judge in a rigidly scientific manner and decisions in this area my be still an art

Thank you