Downgrading

§1Downgrading

§1.2Category

Evidence assessment — Terms describing how the Institute judges and reports the strength of evidence.

§1.3Related terms

• Risk of bias — The extent to which features of a study’s design or conduct could produce an effect estimate that systematically departs from the truth. Assessed at the level of the…
• Indirectness — A mismatch between the population, intervention, comparator or outcome of the contributing studies and those of the question being answered. Also applied where an…
• Imprecision — A confidence interval wide enough that its ends would support different decisions, or an event count too small to constrain the estimate. Assessed against a decision…
• Inconsistency — Unexplained variation in effect estimates across contributing studies, beyond what chance would produce. Consistency of direction with variation in magnitude is treated…
• Publication bias — The risk that the studies available to a review are not a representative sample of the studies conducted, most often because studies with unfavourable results were not…