Quality Assessment Tools: Home

If you're using Covidence for managing your systematic review, you have the option of conducting your critical appraisal within the Data Extraction section of Covidence. You can either use the default template (Cochrane's Risk of Bias tool) or choose to start from scratch and build your own.

• How to create a quality assessment template in Covidence

  This guide provides step-by-step instructions for building your critical appraisal tool in Covidence.

Appraisal Tools for Multiple Study Designs:

• Checklists from the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (multiple study designs)

  CASP provides a set of appraisal checklists for randomized controlled trials, systematic reviews, qualitative studies, diagnostic studies, case control studies, economic evaluations, cohort studies, and clinical prediction rules.

• Checklists from the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (multiple study designs)

  Critical appraisal tools from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford. Checklists available for randomized controlled trials, systematic reviews, qualitative studies, diagnostic studies, and prognosis studies.

• Checklists from JBI (multiple study designs)

  Critical appraisal checklists from JBI for for randomized controlled trials, systematic reviews, qualitative studies, diagnostic studies, case control studies, economic evaluations, cohort studies, case reports, case series, cross sectional studies, prevalence studies, quasi-experimental studies, and text/opinion.

• Mixed-Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT)

  "The MMAT is a critical appraisal tool that is designed for the appraisal stage of systematic mixed studies reviews, i.e., reviews that include qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods studies. It permits to appraise the methodological quality of five categories to studies: qualitative research, randomized controlled trials, non-randomized studies, quantitative descriptive studies, and mixed methods studies."

Appraisal Tools for Quantitative Study Designs:

• Cochrane Risk of Bias 2 Tool (randomized trials)

  Cochrane's tool for evaluating randomized trials.

• Cochrane's ROBINS-I Tool (non-randomized studies)

  Cochrane's tool for evaluating non-randomized studies of interventions.

• AMSTAR 2 (systematic reviews)

  AMSTAR 2 is a checklist for evaluating the quality of systematic reviews.

JBI Tools:

• JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis

Articles:

• What Quality Assessment Tool Should I Use? A Practical Guide for Systematic Reviews Authors.

  Delavari S, Pourahmadi M, Barzkar F. Iran J Med Sci. 2023 May;48(3):229-231. doi: 10.30476/IJMS.2023.98401.3038. PMID: 37791333; PMCID: PMC10542923.