michigan informatics

Appraising Articles

BMJ published a series of papers by Trisha Greenhalgh on How to Read a Paper. They provide practical and insightful advice on how to critically appraise research articles.

• Getting your bearings (deciding what the paper is about)
• Assessing the methodological quality of published papers
• Statistics for the non-statistician
• Statistics for the non-statistician. II: "Significant" relations and their pitfalls
• Papers that go beyond numbers (qualitative research)
• Papers that tell you what things cost (economic analyses)

JAMA has also published a series of user guides on How to Use an Article. The Centre for Health Evidence provides free access to the full text of the pre-publication versions. [The final papers may be accessed on JAMA's web site with a subscription.]

• How to Get Started
• How to Use Articles About Therapy or Prevention
• How to Use an Article About Harm
• How to Use an Article Reporting Variations in the Outcomes of Health Services 
• How to Use Articles About Health-Related Quality of Life Measurements
• How to Use an Article on Economic Analysis of Clinical Practice
• A User's Guide to Qualitative Research in Health Care