How to create a quality assessment checklist
Normally the quality assessment takes place during the conducting phase of systematic review, but it is a good practice to define it during the planning phase while designing your review protocol. You can define one for your review in the path: Review » Planning Tab » Quality Assessment Checklist.
A quality assessment checklist is composed of three parts:
- A collection of questions
- A collection of pre-defined answers
- A cutoff score
The collection of questions represent quality questions you want to ask after reading each one of the selected studies, as such:
Questions examples
- Are the research aims clearly specified?
- Was the study designed to achieve these aims?
- Are the prediction techniques used clearly described and their selection justified?
- Are the variables considered by the study suitably measured?
- Are the data collection methods adequately detailed?
For a better evaluation, it is a good idea to define the possible answers these questions can receive, so you can put everything together and compare the results, for example:
Answers examples
- Yes
- Partially
- No
Also you should define a weight for each of answers, for example: Yes = 1.0, Partially = 0.5 and No = 0.0. This way, after answering all the questions for each selected study, you will end up with a score for each of them.
You may also apply a cutoff score, meaning every evaluated study with a score below the cutoff score will be disconsidered from the systematic review.
The video below show all the process of creating a quality assessment checklist on Parsifal: