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Systematic Reviews for Non-Health Sciences

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What is critical appraisal?

Critical appraisal, also known as risk of bias assessment or quality assessment, helps to establish transparency of evidence synthesis results and findings. A risk of bias assessment is often performed for each included study in your review. Evidence syntheses strive to eliminate bias in their findings. Individual studies that are included in a synthesis may include biases in their results or conclusions, for example design flaws that raise questions about validity of findings or an overestimate of intervention effect. Risk of bias assessment generally is not required with evidence synthesis methods outside of systematic reviews. However, this may depend on the evidence synthesis method that you are utilizing.

This Cochrane Training presentation helps to navigate the steps of Risk of Bias Assessment, but some things might not apply to other disciplines. For disciplines outside of human medicine, the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme provides checklists that can be applied to a diverse array of study types, and the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool can be a helpful resource if included studies use mixed methods. 

Source: Cornell University Library