Cochrane uses the GRADE system to rate the certainty of the body of evidence and to grade the strength of recommendations. More information can be found in the GRADE guidelines, on the Melbourne Grade Centre website, or see the grade guidelines guidance. For systematic reviews, GRADE provides a standardised approach to the appraisal of discrete outcomes from your meta-analysis or meta-synthesis.
Cochrane recommends the following checklists for assessing the risk of bias of the individual studies included in your review, as these checklists work well with the GRADE system:
Additional checklists from a range of organisations are available for assessing a variety of study designs. See the list below:
CASP (checklists for RCT, SRs, qualitative studies, cohort studies, diagnostic studies, case control studies, economic evaluation studies, clinical prediction rule studies)
CEBM (checklists for SRs, diagnosis, prognosis, RCTs, qualitative studies, IPD reviews)
CONSORT (checklist for RCTs)
COSMIN (checklists for Patient Reported Outcome Measures, reliability or measurement error of outcome measurement instruments, study design, reporting)
Dartmouth Biomedical Libraries (checklists for RCTs, SRs, practice guidelines, diagnostic test studies, prognosis studies, harm-etiology studies, qualitative studies)
Health Evidence (checklist for review articles)
JBI (checklists for analytical cross sectional studies, case control, case report, case series, cohort studies, diagnostic test accuracy studies, economic evaluations, prevalence studies, qualitative research, quasi-experimental studies, RCTs, SRs, text & opinion)
McGill Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences (checklist for mixed methods)
NCCMT National Collaborating Centre for methods and tools (checklists for quality assessment of community evidence)
NIH: NHLBI (checklists for controlled intervention studies, SRs & meta analyses, observational cohort & cross sectional studies, case control studies, before after studies with no control group, case series). PROBAST (Risk of Bias and Applicability of Prediction Model Studies).
Critical appraisal tools do not consider the potential impact of racial biases on a paper's quality. This supplementary tool has been developed in order to support appraisers in explicitly addressing racial bias.
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Quality Appraisal Tool consists of 14 questions that assess the quality of health research from an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspective.