"Appraisal is a technique which offers a discipline for increasing the effectiveness of your reading, by enabling you to quickly exclude papers that are of too poor a quality to inform practice, and to systematically evaluate those that pass muster to extract their salient points."

The CASP papers below are included within the toolkit. The other links are on the Internet

The Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) and Evidence-based Practice

What is CASP?

The Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) is a programme within Learning & Development at the Public Health Resource Unit. Since 1993 the programme has helped to develop an evidence-based approach in health and social care, working with local, national and international groups

The following six documents (reproduced with permission) may help you to try your hand at critical appraisal

11 questions to help you make sense of a Case Control Study

12 questions to help you make sense of a cohort study

10 questions to help you make sense of economic evaluations

10 questions to help you make sense of a review

10 Questions to help you make sense of Qualitative Research

10 questions to help you make sense of a randomised controlled trial

Randomised controlled trial of the READER method of critical appraisal in general practice
Domhnall MacAuley, Evelyn McCrum, and Conor Brown
BMJ 1998; 316: 1134-1137

Paper included within this toolkit by permission BMJ