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Evidence Reviews for Health & Social Care

What is critical appraisal?

"CASP offers critical appraisal skills training, articles and tools to help improve your evidence based research, enabling you to check clinical research for trustworthiness, results & relevance."

(Critical Appraisal Skills Programme, 2025, para. 2)

Critical appraisal is the systematic evaluation of clinical research papers in order to establish:

  1. Does this study address a clearly focused question?
  2. Did the study use valid methods to address this question?
  3. Are the valid results of this study important?
  4. Are these valid, important results applicable to my patient or population?

Read:

Tod, D., Booth, A. and Smith, B. (2022) ‘Critical appraisal’. International Review of Sport and Exercise, 15 (1) doi:10.1080/1750984x.2021.1952471.

Look at: 

Anatomy of a journal article (click on lightbulbs for videos and more information)

There are many critical appraisal tools to help you evaluate research studies

  • Assess Quality and Validity
  • Ensures relevance
  • Supports evidence-based practice
  • Promotes consistency

Below are the commonly used critical appraisal tools in healthcare

CASP

CASP - Critical Appraisal Skills Programme

This set of eight critical appraisal tools/worksheets are designed to be used when reading research. CASP has appraisal checklists designed for use with Systematic Reviews & Literature Reviews, Randomised Controlled Trials, Cohort Studies, Case Control Studies, Economic Evaluations, Diagnostic Studies, Qualitative studies and Clinical Prediction Rule.

JBI Critical Appraisal Tool

JBI's Critical Appraisal Tools downloads

JBI’s critical appraisal tools/worksheets help you assess the trustworthiness, relevance and results of published papers.

(often used when dissertation is a scoping review & you are required to do critical appraisal)

MMAT Appraisal Tool

Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT)

MMAT is used for qualitative, quantitative, and/or mixed methods studies. Helpful for those working on a Mixed Methods Review. 

Read:

Hong, Q. N., Fàbregues, S., Bartlett, G., Boardman, F., Cargo, M., Dagenais, P., Gagnon, M.-P., Griffiths, F., Nicolau, B., O’Cathain, A., Rousseau, M.-C., Vedel, I., & Pluye, P. (2018). The Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT) version 2018 for information professionals and researchers. Education for Information, 34(4), 285–291. https://doi.org/10.3233/EFI-180221