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Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM)

Reporting and Quality (risk of bias)

Risk of bias: avoiding or minimising

Reporting and Critical appraisal - introduction

Risk of bias can be avoided or minimised by following a thorough reporting procedure, and then applying a careful critical appraisal of the selected material. 

Reporting procedures for the identification and selection of material include Prisma.  Prisma is used for Systematic Reviews.

  • This includes developing an effective search strategy with a good range of suitable search terms
  • Searching on a range of databases, registers and (as required) grey literature, enables a broad coverage of source material

Employing Critical Appraisal methods should ensure an effective quality assessment of material analysed for the review, and thereby also minimise the risk of bias.

  • CASP and other tools are available

 

Further details

The next tabs in this section cover Reporting and Critical appraisal with further links to available resources.

 

Citation Justice

Movements such as Citation Justice seek to redress imbalances or bias in citation coverage. See Surmain, Chapain and Lateano (2023) for a helpful summary. 

See the Academic Skills Centre (University of Birmingham) guide to Systematic reviews for more information and suggested reading.

 

References

Academic Skills Centre, Libraries and Learning Resources, University of Birmingham (2023) Systematic reviews. Available at: https://libguides.bham.ac.uk/asc/systematicreviews (Accessed 20 December 2023)

Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (2024) CASP Checklists.  Available at: https://casp-uk.net/casp-tools-checklists/ (Accessed 7 February 2024)

Prisma (2024) Flow diagram.  Available at: http://prisma-statement.org/PRISMAStatement/FlowDiagram (Accessed 7 February 2024)

Surman, E., Chapain, C. and Lateano, A. (2023) Citation Justice – what it is and how you can practice it.  Available at: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2023/citation-justice-what-it-is-and-how-you-can-practice-it (Accessed 20 December 2023)

There are reporting guidelines for different types of research.

  • Systematic Reviews are covered by PRISMA.  PRISMA is often best-known for the flowchart or diagram for literature searching and article identification for the different stages of a systematic review
  • Randomized Controlled Trials are covered by Consort (amongst others).
  • For Prognostic Studies, see PROBAST 

 

 

Critical appraisal also seeks to reduce the risk of bias by applying a set of checklist criteria against examples of each study type.

Some specific, well-known quality assessment resources are:

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