Systematic Reviews (in the Health Sciences)

Each study needs to be appraised based on study type. This page includes common quality assessment and risk of bias tools for many different types of studies. To identify which tool is best suited for your research, run a small pilot test using several of your seed articles. Begin with the most commonly used tools noted below. If none of the tools listed fit your needs, you can find more examples in published systematic reviews and via a Google search.

One of the most commonly used tools to asses Risk of Bias for intervention studies is the Cochrane Risk of Bias (ROB) 2.0 tool. See additional Cochrane Risk of Bias tools for use in systematic reviews. 

​​​​​Another commonly used Cochrane tool is robvis - a web app designed for visualizing risk-of-bias assessments performed as part of a systematic review. This tool creates:

• “traffic light” plots of the domain-level judgements for each individual result; and
• weighted bar plots of the distribution of risk-of-bias judgements within each bias domain

Steps for Appraisal

1. Each included study is appraised/assessed for quality independently by at least two reviewers.
2. Many SR teams also assess the strength of the entire body of evidence using the GRADE approach. This provides an overall certainty rating for each outcome.