A brief introduction and tips for students embarking on a rapid review, when they should be used, and their advantages and limitations.
Would you like to try something a bit different? Cochrane are inviting the S4BE community to make short videos for their TikTok and Instagram platforms. Read on to find out more!
Our library features links to a range of resources that can help you get to grips with various aspects of evidence-based healthcare. From statistics tutorials to guidance on how to critically appraise a paper. This page is continually updated, so do let us know if you know of resources that are missing.
This blog provides an introduction to critically appraising diagnostic studies. Find out what questions are important to ask as you go through a paper.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, clinical health researchers face the delicate balancing act of producing rigorous, reliable research, but doing so in as short a timeframe as possible.
Chiara has spent 3 months with Cochrane Sweden on the newly formed Cochrane International Mobility (CIM) programme. She provides an overview of the activities she’s been involved in and encourages others to find out more.
The Catalogue of Bias (CoB), is a digital resource for clinicians, students, researchers, investigators, and consumers of health evidence. As of posting this blog, the catalogue has 49 published biases.
This blog is a critical appraisal of a randomized controlled trial examining the effectiveness of different exercises and stretching physiotherapy on pain and movement in patellofemoral pain syndrome.
The EU Trials Tracker, devised by the EBM DataLab at the University of Oxford, tracks which trials on the European Union Clinical Trials Register (EUCTR) have reported their results within a year of completion. Learn more about this tracker and how you need to take action.
GRADE (Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation) is a prominent framework for evaluating the effectiveness of systematic reviews. This blog provides detail of the GRADE approach with useful links to further reading on this key process.
A Finnish translation (thank you to Eveliina Ilola) of the nuts and bolts 20 minute tutorial from Tim Hicks: A beginner’s guide to interpreting odds ratios, confidence intervals and p-values.
This is the thirty-fifth blog in a series of 36 blogs explaining 36 key concepts we need to be able to understand to think critically about treatment claims.
The certainty of the evidence (the extent to which the research provides a good indication of the likely effects of treatments) can affect the treatment decisions people make. For example, someone might decide not to use or to pay for a treatment if the certainty of the evidence is low or very low.
This is the twenty-third blog in a series of 36 blogs explaining 36 key concepts we need to be able to understand to think critically about treatment claims.
Many fair comparisons never get published, and outcomes are sometimes left out. Those that do get published are more likely to report favourable results. As a consequence, reliance on published reports sometimes results in the beneficial effects of treatments being overestimated and the adverse effects being underestimated.
This is the twenty-second blog in a series of 36 blogs explaining 36 key concepts we need to be able to understand to think critically about treatment claims.
Even though a comparison of treatments has been published in a prestigious journal, it may not be a fair comparison and the results may not be reliable. Peer review (assessment of a study by others working in the same field) does not guarantee that published studies are reliable. Assessments vary and may not be systematic.
Critical appraisal tools (CATs) are commonly used by students and researchers alike, as a way of judging a study’s quality. In this blog, Dennis Neuen addresses the need to appraise these tools and has also collated a list of 12 CATs from all over the world.