Читать книгу The Pocket Guide to Critical Appraisal - Iain K. Crombie - Страница 6

This book was written to meet the needs of health professionals as medicine moves to be evidence‐based. The initial idea arose during discussion with younger colleagues and students on difficulties of interpreting the medical literature. It quickly became apparent that their needs would be best met by a short book detailing criteria for critical appraisal.

The book is organised in two parts. The first five chapters provide an introduction to critical appraisal of quantitative research, indicating how papers can be read and how the results can be interpreted. Experienced researchers could easily omit these chapters. The final six chapters provide annotated checklists for critical appraisal. The first of these contains the general questions which can be asked of any study using a quantitative methodology. The succeeding five chapters review in turn the questions which are specific for each quantitative method. For convenience each of these five chapters concludes with a combined list of general and specific questions.

The book has been written to be simple and quick to use. Technical terms are avoided where possible, and the assessment criteria are explained but not justified. A larger and less accessible text would have been needed to give a proper rationale for each the checklists. To keep this a pocket guide, it was also decided to omit evaluations of other topics such as qualitative methods, health economics, clinical audit, decision analysis, and screening tests. An argument could be made for the inclusion of each, but to include them all would nearly double the size of the book. I hope the checklists prove useful.