Critical Appraisal skills enable you to systematically assess the validity, relevance, accuracy and results of published papers.

Critical appraisal is an essential step in the process of evidence-based practice.

Acquiring critical appraisal skills, and adopting them into your everyday practice will enable you to make informed, evidence-based decisions.

Making sense of health research

This online tool will guide you through a series of questions to help you to review and interpret a published health research paper.

Please see Understanding Health Research.

Critical appraisal techniques for healthcare literature

Free online course.

Learn how to critically appraise published medical research literature to keep up to date with research developments in your field.

Please see the Futurelearn website: Critical Appraisal Techniques for Healthcare Literature.

Finding and appraising the evidence

These modules take you through the process of how to find the evidence and then how to assess the validity and reliability of the published research in order to provide effective and efficient healthcare.

The course is made up of six modules.

Please see the HealthKnowledge website: Finding and Appraising the Evidence.

Critical appraisal tools - Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM)

Critical Appraisal worksheets to help you appraise the reliability, importance and applicability of clinical evidence.

Please see the CEBM website: Critical Appraisal tools.

Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP)

These critical appraisal tools are designed to be used when reading research.

CASP has appraisal checklists designed for use with:

  • Systematic Reviews
  • Randomised Controlled Trials
  • Cohort Studies
  • Case Control Studies
  • Economic Evaluations
  • Diagnostic Studies
  • Qualitative studies
  • Clinical Prediction Rule

Please see CASP website: CASP Checklists.

Students 4 Best Evidence (S4BE) - Cochrane

This is a growing network of students from around the world, from school age to university, who are interested in learning more about evidence-based health care (EBH).

Whether you are training to be a doctor, nurse or other health professional, or you're a school student thinking about studying medicine, S4BE Contributors pull together all the resources on EBH into one interactive space, where we hope you will find the right information for you and help you meet other like-minded students.

Please see the S4BE website: Cochrane: participate, connect and learn.