Subject Guides: CATWalk: A Guide to Critically Appraised Topics: Home

What is a CAT?

CATs were developed in the early 1990s as a means of teaching the principles of evidence-based medicine. Different acronyms have emerged in various specialties (e.g., POEMS in family medicine), but they all do essentially the same thing.

When preparing a CAT, you will:

Formulate a clinical question
Search for clinical research that might address the question
Evaluate that research for
- Validity
- Importance
- Applicability to care of your patient
- Write and file a summary page

Learning about Evidence Based Medicine

Evidence-Based Mini-Manual
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Based in part on the Evidence-Based Medicine Toolkit, http://www.ebm.med.ualberta.ca/ ”… a collection of tools for identifying, assessing and applying relevant evidence for better health care decision-making. The appraisal tools are adapted from the Users' Guides series prepared by the Evidence Based Medicine Working Group and originally published in JAMA"
BMJ: How to read a paper series
Articles from the BMJ that explain how to read and interpret different kinds of research papers.
Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (Oxford)
Provides Critical Appraisal worksheets as well as the CATmaker, a computer-assisted critical appraisal tool which helps you create Critically Appraised Topics (CATs) for key articles.
Introduction to Evidence Based Practice
A tutorial from Duke University.
McMaster Evidence Based Practice Resources
A guide to evidence based practice from McMaster University.