Post Graduate Internship Orientation Portal 2022

Appraising Directness:  Will I read this article?

When appraising evidence, it is important that we first check if the article that we have retrieved from our literature search can provide a direct enough answer to our clinical question.  To assess directness, we compare the Population, Exposure (or intervention and comparator), and Outcome(s) of the study with the P-E-O of our clinical question.  Assessing directness serves as a screening step--if the article that we have does NOT provide a direct enough answer to our clinical question, then we can discard it and look for a better article.

Appraising Validity: Will I believe this article?

When appraising validity, what we are really assessing is how closely the study results are to the truth.  To do this, we need to evaluate how scientifically sound the study is, or how flawed it might be.  This is important because study flaws may lead to bias, which may result in an over- or underestimation of the results that we are interested in.

There are many different tools available that can guide us in assessing the validity of different types of studies that answer different types of clinical questions.  Regardless of which tool we use, it is important to remember that our appraisal of the validity of the article should be guided by the type of clinical question we have, i.e. whether our clinical question is on therapy, diagnosis, harm, prognosis, or if the article we are considering is a systematic review.

Appraising the Results

The "results" of a study refer to the numeric expressions of effectiveness, accuracy, causal relationships and prognosis.  These are usually presented as a risk or probability (e.g. relative risk, odds ratio) or as mean values.  It is important to know how to interpret the results of the study because this will enable us to make judgments on how effective an intervention or accurate a diagnostic test might be.