Critical Appraisal – are there any tools that can help you? (#24)

When you are looking at research articles you need to appraise them critically for validity, results and relevance. This means looking at the paper in a systematic way to determine whether it is going to help you to answer your question.

There are a wide range of tools that can help you to develop your skills in doing this. Our etutorial Critical Appraisal Tools will introduce you to some tools that can help. The tools do not necessarily give you a definitive “yes” or “no” but they help you to ask the right questions to assess the paper.

Tools icon - use critical appraisal tools to help you to assess research papers

In a similar way that we use the CRAAP tool (see previous blog post) if an item fails your appraisal it does not necessarily mean that it is a rubbish paper, just that it will not help you to answer your question.

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