Another goodie from Anne Taylor-Vaisey: Singapore Med J. 2005 Mar;46(3):108-14; quiz 115.
How to read a paper: critical appraisal of studies for application in healthcare.
Makela M, Witt K.
Health
Technology Assessment at Stakes (Research and Development Centre for
Welfare and Health), P O Box 220, 00531 Helsinki, Finland.
Finding and using research results to
support your professional decisions must be a systematic process, based
on the principles of evidence-based medicine and healthcare.
This article takes you through a critical appraisal exercise using a
recent article from the British Medical Journal as an example.
It describes how you decide whether to read and use an article that may
be relevant to your decision.
The reading is guided by a series of questions.
First you evaluate the validity of the article: is the study conducted
and reported so that you may trust the results? The second set of
questions discusses the outcomes, the effect of the intervention and
describes the use of confidence intervals for this.
The possibility of using the research results in the reader's setting
and patient population is then evaluated.
MeSH Terms:
- Education, Medical, Continuing
- Evidence-Based Medicine/standards*
- Humans
- Information Storage and Retrieval
- Intervention Studies
- Judgment*
- Periodicals*
- Professional Competence
- Reading*
- Reproducibility of Results
- Research Design
PMID: 15735874 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
