Critical appraisal in rapid systematic reviews of COVID-19 studies: implementation of the Quality Criteria Checklist (QCC).

ABSTRACT: In this letter, we briefly describe how we selected and implemented the quality criteria checklist (QCC) as a critical appraisal tool in rapid systematic reviews conducted to inform public health advice, guidance and policy during the COVID-19 pandemic. As these rapid reviews usually included a range of study designs, it was key to identify a single tool that would allow for reliable critical appraisal across most experimental and observational study designs and applicable to a range of topics. After carefully considering a number of existing tools, the QCC was selected as it had good interrater agreement between three reviewers (Fleiss kappa coefficient 0.639) and was found to be easy and fast to apply once familiar with the tool. The QCC consists of 10 questions, with sub-questions to sp

SUBMITTER: Duval D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10042397 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature