GRADE (Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluations) is a transparent framework for developing and presenting summaries of evidence and provides a systematic approach for making clinical practice recommendations. It is the most widely adopted tool for grading the quality of evidence and for making recommendations with over 100 organizations worldwide officially endorsing GRADE.

PICO is a framework used by clinicians to create targeted and researchable clinical questions. To learn more about what this framework consists of, please read the PICO Questions Infographic here. 

This chart is designed to ask researchers and clinicians the right questions before beginning work on a systematic review. For more information on what those questions consist of, please read the systematic review chart here. 

Forest plots are a graphic representation of the articles and findings in a meta-analysis. A forest plot is the most effective tool for showcasing heterogeneity and pooled results. For more information on interpreting Forest Plots, please read the Forest Plots handout here. 

The risk of bias assessment (sometimes called "quality assessment" or "critical appraisal") helps to establish transparency of evidence synthesis results and findings. A risk of bias assessment is often performed for each study to be included in your review. The risk of bias is assessed frequently by evaluating the study design and the conduct of the study has been affected by bias or not. For more information on types of biases in systematic review, please read the handout of Risk of Bias Assessment here. 

The Cochrane Library (ISSN 1465-1858) is an evidence-based database that contains different types of high-quality, independent evidence to inform healthcare decision-making. The Cochrane Library is owned by Cochrane and published by Wiley. Cochrane is one of the required databases to use for literature searching in a systematic review. For more information on how to use the Cochrane Library, please read the Cochrane Guide here. 

Meta-analysis is the statistical combination of results from two or more separate studies. Conducting a meta-analysis can improve precision, answer questions not posed by the individual studies, and generate new hypotheses. For more information on meta-analysis, please read the overview guide here. 

This is a great handout sheet created by librarians at the Ruth Lilly Library at Indiana University which lists commonly used EBM & Critical Appraisal calculations. Click here for more information on the cheat sheet.