The Doctor's Guide to Critical Appraisal
The whole concept of critical appraisal is something that I initially found pretty intimidating, particularly as I had managed to avoid really getting to grips with it until my first journal club. After a session spent silently watching my colleagues discuss 'cohort studies', 'odds ratios' and 'number needed to treat', I headed home via the hospital library to find a suitable remedy for my lack of knowledge.
'The Doctor's Guide to Critical Appraisal' was the prefect solution to my predicament, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who is likely to encounter critical appraisal at some part in their career (which is probably almost everyone). The book gives a great step wise approach to the entire critical appraisal process, starting out with the basics of study design, and continuing through the myriad of pitfalls that can befall scientific papers, which need to be understood before any critical appraisal can take place. I found that the book struck the right balance between simplicity and detail; allowing relative novices like myself to get a decent understanding of the general ideas before expanding on the important points. The description of these points is, on the whole, very well done, with diagrams employed in the right places to help illustrate certain visual concepts. I also found that the examples they used to illustrate some principle (e.g. bias), were well selected to help my understanding, as were the questions they set you. As such, I feel I have come away from the book with the confidence to hold an intelligent conversation about a paper’s scientific merits and flaws, and with it a greater interest in finding out exactly what a paper can tell me.
The flaws of the book relate more to the nature of critical appraisal itself than the book, but there were points in the book where I was struggling to keep up with what was being explained. This was particularly noticeable in the section of the book dedicated to statistics (a dread inducing topic at the best of times), and it is here that the previously excellent descriptions failed to fully tackle such a broad and challenging topic. I don’t doubt that this is because the statistics employed in academic papers fill books of their own, but it means that my understanding of the statistical tests has lagged behind the rest of my critical appraisal skills. Again, the basics are fairly well explained but I would quickly go rather quiet if any conversation I was in lingered too long on regression analysis or the Wilcoxon signed-rank test (though I hope I would generally try avoid these sorts of conversations anyway…)
In summary, the authors provide an easily accessible introduction to the vast topic of critical appraisal. Its structured approach lets you get a good basic framework before it fills in the important details you need. I can’t picture many books providing a better introduction to the subject, but if you are already pretty familiar with the ins and outs of critical appraisal, you might want to look elsewhere to expand your skills.
Ratings
Overall 7/10
Content 8/10
Explanations 8/10
Diagrams 8/10
Ease of use 7/10
Summary: An accessible introduction to critical appraisal.
By Tom Heaton
Check it out on Amazon here!
'The Doctor's Guide to Critical Appraisal' was the prefect solution to my predicament, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who is likely to encounter critical appraisal at some part in their career (which is probably almost everyone). The book gives a great step wise approach to the entire critical appraisal process, starting out with the basics of study design, and continuing through the myriad of pitfalls that can befall scientific papers, which need to be understood before any critical appraisal can take place. I found that the book struck the right balance between simplicity and detail; allowing relative novices like myself to get a decent understanding of the general ideas before expanding on the important points. The description of these points is, on the whole, very well done, with diagrams employed in the right places to help illustrate certain visual concepts. I also found that the examples they used to illustrate some principle (e.g. bias), were well selected to help my understanding, as were the questions they set you. As such, I feel I have come away from the book with the confidence to hold an intelligent conversation about a paper’s scientific merits and flaws, and with it a greater interest in finding out exactly what a paper can tell me.
The flaws of the book relate more to the nature of critical appraisal itself than the book, but there were points in the book where I was struggling to keep up with what was being explained. This was particularly noticeable in the section of the book dedicated to statistics (a dread inducing topic at the best of times), and it is here that the previously excellent descriptions failed to fully tackle such a broad and challenging topic. I don’t doubt that this is because the statistics employed in academic papers fill books of their own, but it means that my understanding of the statistical tests has lagged behind the rest of my critical appraisal skills. Again, the basics are fairly well explained but I would quickly go rather quiet if any conversation I was in lingered too long on regression analysis or the Wilcoxon signed-rank test (though I hope I would generally try avoid these sorts of conversations anyway…)
In summary, the authors provide an easily accessible introduction to the vast topic of critical appraisal. Its structured approach lets you get a good basic framework before it fills in the important details you need. I can’t picture many books providing a better introduction to the subject, but if you are already pretty familiar with the ins and outs of critical appraisal, you might want to look elsewhere to expand your skills.
Ratings
Overall 7/10
Content 8/10
Explanations 8/10
Diagrams 8/10
Ease of use 7/10
Summary: An accessible introduction to critical appraisal.
By Tom Heaton
Check it out on Amazon here!
