EBVM Toolkit 5: is this paper worth my time?

Introduction

Critical appraisal is a process which is used to help you identify the strengths and weakness of a research paper.  Understanding how appropriate the study design is for the question you are seeking to answer, how well the study was carried out, and how good the reporting in the paper is helps you to assess whether the paper is likely to provide reliable evidence.  

In veterinary medicine many papers are published each week and it would be impossible to read them all.  By defining your clinical question using the PICO method and using that as the basis of your search strategy you will have reduced the number of papers that you will need to read.

You can screen the papers further by considering the following questions before carrying out a full critical appraisal. To answer the questions you will not need to read the whole paper instead you can focus on the sections indicated. 

Does the paper address your clinical question?

Look at the paper’s introduction to see if the research question being asked in the paper is relevant to your clinical question e.g. is the population of the study similar to your patient? Be wary of relying on the title and abstract because these do not always reflect the content of the paper.

Does the paper address your clinical question? [is this meant to be a duplicate?]

Consult the methodology or methods section of the paper for information about the study design. Different types of study provide different types of evidence (see EBVM Toolkits 3 and 4 for more information on study design). This means that your question will best be answered by a particular type of study e.g. A Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) is the most appropriate study for answering questions about the efficacy of interventions.

Next step

If the paper addresses your clinical question and the study is designed appropriately, then you will need to critically appraise the quality of the study. EBVM Toolkits 6-15 provide checklists for the different types of study to help you do this.

Further reading

• Dean, R. (2013) How to read a paper and appraise the evidence. In Practice, 35 (5), pp. 282-285. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1136/inp.f1760
• Greenhalgh, T. (2014) How to read a paper: The basics of evidence-based medicine. 5th ed. Wiley Blackwell