Example of tools MERST uses regularly:
Protocol Development
PROSPERO
“PROSPERO includes protocol details for systematic reviews relevant to health and social care, welfare, public health, education, crime, justice, and international development, where there is a health related outcome.
Systematic review protocols on PROSPERO can include any type of any study design. Reviews of reviews and reviews of methodological issues that contain at least one outcome of direct patient or clinical relevance are also accepted.” Read more…
Critical Appraisal Tool
AMSTAR
“AMSTAR stands for A MeaSurement Tool to Assess systematic Reviews. There has been a proliferation of systematic reviews as one of the key tools for evidence-based health care. This has presented both opportunities and risks. The opportunities being that it creates an environment where researchers can base decisions on accurate, succinct, credible, comprehensive and comprehensible summaries of the best available evidence on a topic thereby minimising error and bias. The risks include variation in quality and empirical validation.” Read more…
Effective Public Health Practice Project: Quality assessment tool (EPHPP)
“Developed for use in public health for quantitative studie. Various types of public health professionals would find this tool relevant to utilize sources of high quality literature to support the decision-making process, especially when designing, implementing and evaluating public health programs and policy.” Read more…
Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS)
“It was developed to assess the quality of nonrandomised studies with its design, content and ease of use directed to the task of incorporating the quality assessments in the interpretation of meta-analytic results.” Read more…
Tools for Meta-Analysis
Cochrane RoB tool
Cochran Risk of Bias (RoB) tool is a revised tool for assessing risk of bias in randomized trials. Read more…
Cochrane ROBINS-I tool
“The ROBINS-I tool (Risk Of Bias In Non-randomized Studies – of Interventions) is a new tool for assessing the risk of bias in systematic reviews (rather than in primary studies). Here you can find the tool itself, information to help you complete a ROBIS assessment, and resources to help you present the results of your ROBIS assessment.” Read more...
GRADE®
The Grading of Recommendations, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) assesses the certainty of the evidence and is a key component in the development of recommendation and guidelines. Read more…