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LASUMSARESEARCH • JOURNAL CLUB

Open resources

Resources

The appraisal checklists, reporting guidelines, search tools and software we use. Everything here is free, and most of it is the standard reference rather than our own recommendation.

01

Critical appraisal & methodology

  • CASP checklists

    External

    The Critical Appraisal Skills Programme checklists — the appraisal tools we use in session for diagnostic, cohort, RCT and qualitative designs.

    Visit

  • Cochrane Handbook

    External

    The reference standard for systematic review methodology, including risk-of-bias assessment and GRADE. Free to read online.

    Visit

  • EQUATOR Network

    External

    Every major reporting guideline in one index — CONSORT, STROBE, PRISMA, ARRIVE, TRIPOD, STARD and others, with extensions.

    Visit

  • JBI Manual

    External

    Chapter-by-chapter guidance for the main evidence synthesis designs, with worked examples.

    Visit

  • GRADE Working Group

    External

    How certainty of evidence is rated, and how that rating should change what you do.

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  • ICMJE Recommendations

    External

    Authorship, duplicate publication, conflicts of interest and other publication ethics. Required reading before any submission.

    Visit

02

Literature search

  • PubMed

    The default biomedical literature search. Learn the field-tag syntax and MeSH filters before anything else.

    Visit

  • PubMed Central

    Free full text for a large share of the biomedical literature, including much that is not otherwise open access.

    Visit

  • ClinicalTrials.gov

    Registered trial protocols. Checking whether a trial was pre-registered, and whether the outcome matches the registration, is a basic appraisal step.

    Visit

  • Cochrane Library

    Systematic reviews, with the underlying study data and risk-of-bias assessments.

    Visit

  • Unpaywall

    Finds an open-access copy of an article when the publisher's version is paywalled. Works as a browser extension.

    Visit

  • Semantic Scholar

    Useful for citation-graph exploration — which papers cite a work, and what has cited it since.

    Visit

03

Software & tools

  • Zotero

    Reference manager with browser connector and Word plugin. Free, and it stores the PDF with its metadata so your library stays usable offline.

    Visit

  • Rayyan

    Collaborative screening for systematic reviews, with a blinded mode for two independent screeners.

    Visit

  • R (RStudio)

    The default for statistical analysis in the biomedical sciences. Start with the tidyverse.

    Visit

  • Python

    Necessary for image analysis, natural-language processing and most machine-learning work.

    Visit

  • SPSS / JASP / Jamovi

    Point-and-click statistics. Reasonable for a first analysis; know what your test assumes before running it.

    Visit

  • OSF

    Free project hosting with version control and pre-registration for preregistration.

    Visit

04

Five things we keep saying

  1. 01

    Distinguish the null hypothesis from the point of equivalence. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

  2. 02

    Confidence intervals are more informative than p-values, and the width of the interval is a finding in itself.

  3. 03

    Every test assumes something. Write the assumption down before you look at the p-value.

  4. 04

    Multiple comparisons inflate false positives. If you ran twenty comparisons, your nominal 5% threshold is roughly 64%.

  5. 05

    A statistically significant result from a large enough study is nearly guaranteed and may be clinically irrelevant.

05

Our own material

Everything the club has published is a worked example of a structured critical review. Reading them in order is the most useful preparation for a first session, and several members have said it is the only reading that made the method click.

Read the archive (10 articles)

Session format

When
Monthly, during the Wednesday clinical meeting
Where
College of Medicine seminar room
Who
All years, all disciplines. No prior experience assumed.
Bring
The paper, and one sentence on what you think it shows