Review Guidance

Quality Assessment

Assessing the quality of included papers is important when sythesizing information from them. Different aspects of quality can be assessed such as completeness of reporting and methodological quality of the study. To perform a quality assessment, a set of quality criteria need to be determined, along with the scoring method that will be used by all reviewers independently. Several quality assessment tools exist that can be modified for the specific review.

To perform quality assessment, we have typically given each reviewer a worksheet which lists the papers and criteria. Each reviewer then completes the worksheet. The criteria items in the example template below are based on the 10-point scale developed by Johnson et al. (1994). This scale has been used or modified by others as well (e.g. Hunt et al. (1998), Garg et al. (2005)).

Template:

In the above example, each item is scored as 0, 1 or 2.

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Quality Assessment
Data Extraction and Synthesis