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It’s hard to keep up with the latest evidence. Not only is the sheer volume of newly published papers overwhelming and the variety of topics broad and wide, but then after finding a paper that piques your interest you are still faced with the tricky task of critically assessing the paper's quality and relevance. Metajournal aims to solve many of these problems, but sometimes you need to just sit down and drag that paper over the keel yourself.

One of the most useful tools I have found are checklists provided by the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme, a UK non-profit based in Oxford. CASP runs workshops that educate healthcare workers and others on how to appraised medical evidence — and they share online the great checklists they use during the workshop under a Creative Commons license.

They provide a set of eight critical appraisal tools designed to be used when reading research, covering:

1. Systematic Reviews
2. Randomised Controlled Trials
3. Cohort Studies
4. Case Control Studies
5. Economic Evaluations
6. Diagnostic Studies
7. Qualitative studies
8. Clinical Prediction Rule

One of the great classic introductions to critical assessment of medical research is Trisha Greenhalgh’s series in the British Medical Journal ‘How to read a paper’. Although the practical aspects of critiquing a paper are better served by newer tools like CASP, Greenhalgh’s work has stood the test of time and is still worth recommending.

The best place to start is with ‘Getting your bearings — deciding what the paper is about’, and then have a look at ‘Assessing the methodological quality’, and ‘Statistics for the non-statistician I’ & ‘II’.

"It usually comes as a surprise ... to learn that some (perhaps most) published articles belong in the bin, and should certainly not be used to inform practice." — Trisha Greenhalgh.