In a systematic review without meta-analysis, should I necessarily indicate the quality of the evidence (GRADE) for each study included in the review?
Dear Maribel Da cunha ,
I agree with Liang-Tseng Kuo . It is not appropriated to use GRADE if you do not have a sumary of the body of evidence. It is common beginners in systematic reviews who have been told to use GRADE (because everybody is using) and they think GRADE is to assess primary/individual studies. I think what Dean Whitehead means is that is advisable to assess the methodological quality of the primary/individual included studies (to assess risk of bias). For that you can use all the tools commented by the others who answered this question.
Best regards,
Erica
GRADE is used to assess the overall quality of synthetic evidence from a systematic review. That is, it is inappropriate to use GRADE to judge the results from the systematic review without meta-analysis, thought it can be applied.
Maribel - it is not essential - but it is advisable. You would be best to either use an alternative framework or justify why you have not used one.
One option that you could consider is the weight of evidence (WoE) framework of Gough. It can be used with various types of review, and takes into account not just the quality of the evidence but also how relevant it is to your question. Gough, D. (2007). Weight of evidence: a framework for the appraisal of the quality and relevance of evidence. Research papers in education, 22(2), 213-228.
GRADE tool will mainly use the pooled data and methodology to assess the quality of evidence. Hence, if you cannot pool the data unless you do in case of meta-analysis, you may not be able to evaluate the quality of evidence. All you may get is just a mere table that will not give much information other than the tables already present until the stage of qualitative synthesis.
Like Anusuya Venkatachalapathy . Just would like to add on that GRADE is used to assess certainty of evidence. In order to assess quality of evidence a number of tools can be used depending on the study design e.g. ROBINS-I, Newcastle Ottawa (NOS), RoB2.0 etc.
Dear Maribel Da cunha ,
I agree with Liang-Tseng Kuo . It is not appropriated to use GRADE if you do not have a sumary of the body of evidence. It is common beginners in systematic reviews who have been told to use GRADE (because everybody is using) and they think GRADE is to assess primary/individual studies. I think what Dean Whitehead means is that is advisable to assess the methodological quality of the primary/individual included studies (to assess risk of bias). For that you can use all the tools commented by the others who answered this question.
Best regards,
Erica
Erica - that is a correct interpretation of what I was trying to convey. Many thanks!!
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