- 1What kind of paper is this?Reading a paper and appraising one are different skills. Where evidence-based medicine came from, and the first skill it asks for: classifying a study by design in about a minute.6 min
- 2Read the methods first, and find where bias entersQuestion, design, participants, comparison, outcomes, transparency — the frame for appraising any study. Then the hard idea: confounding is what you failed to adjust for, selection bias is who ended up in the study, and only one of them can be fixed by statistics.6 min
- 3A real methods section, read out loudA published methods section worked through line by line, with the reader’s own questions left in: why randomize districts rather than children, what a two-thirds completion rate does to the comparison, and why particular outcomes were named in advance.7 min
- 4Effect sizes, confidence intervals, and how results get misreadWhy the interval carries more information than the p-value, worked through two risk ratios where a non-significant result is consistent with a 40% reduction, no effect, and a 5% increase at the same time.5 min
- 5Reading tables and figuresFour real figures from one study: a baseline table with shifting denominators, a regression table with unadjusted against adjusted odds ratios, Kaplan-Meier curves, and a flow diagram that starts at 12,064 patients and ends at 10,102.9 min
- 6Qualitative rigor, and reading the discussion like a skepticQualitative work judged on its own terms — informational richness rather than representativeness, and why one quote from one person is an anecdote rather than a theme. Then the discussion section: the slip from associated with to leads to, and what authors leave out.9 min