Occupational Therapy Resources: Critical Appraisal for Articles

Once you have found articles, it is a good habit to critically appraise every one of them. Articles from a database are not guaranteed to be peer-reviewed, and a peer-reviewed articles is not guaranteed to be sound and true research!

Critical appraisal tools help evaluate articles by highlighting the important methodologic components of each study design type. The Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) has a number of checklists that you can use.

Things to note:

• You will need to know the article's study design type in order to select the appropriate checklist
• These checklists will not give you a quantitative score or overall score advice - so in other words, it's up to you to decide what the checklist answers mean in terms of the article's research quality!